senate confirmation hearing for mike pompeo. he currently serves as the ra director. he will testify before the foreign affairs committee. listen with the free c-span radio app. facebookr today founder and ceo mark zuckerberg testified on access to users data. this should take in front of the senate judiciary.

the judiciary and commerce science and transportation will come to order. we welcome everyone to today's hearing on facebook's social media privacy and the use and abuse of data. although not unprecedented, this is a unique hearing. the issues we will consider range from data privacy and security to consumer protection

and the federal trade commission enforcement, touching on jurisdictions of these two committees. we have 44 members between our two committees. that may not seem like a large group by facebook standards, but it is significant here for a hearing in the united states senate. we will do our best to keep things moving efficiently, given our circumstances. we will begin with opening statements from the chairman and ranking members of each committee, starting with chairman thune and then provide with mr. zuckerberg's opening statement. we will then move on to questioning. each member will have five minutes to question witnesses. i'd like to remind the members of both committees that time limits will be and must be strictly if forced given the

numbers that we have here today. if you're over your time, chairman thune and i will make sure to let you know. there will not be a second round as well. of course, there will be the usual follow-up written questions for the record. questioning will alternate between majority and minority and between committees. we will proceed in order based on respective committee seniority. we will anticipate a couple short breaks later in the afternoon. and so it's my pleasure to recognize the chairman of the commerce committee, chairman thune for his opening statement. >> thank you, chairman grassley. today's hearing is extraordinary to hold a joint committee hearing, it's even more extraordinary to have a single ceo testify before nearly half

of the united states senate. facebook is pretty extraordinary. more than one billion people use facebook every month. 1.4 billion people use it every day. more than the population of any country on earth except china, and more than four times the population of the united states. it's also more than 1,500 times the population of my home state of south dakota. in many respects, facebook's incredible reach is why we're here today. we're here because of what you, mr., zuckerberg have scribed as a breach of trust. a quiz app used by 300,000 people led to information about 87 million facebook users being obtained by the company, cambridge analytica. there are plenty of questions about the behavior of camerabri

analyt analyti analytica. as you've said this is not likely to be an isolated incident. a fact demonstrated by facebook's suspension of another firm this past weekend. you promised that when facebook discovered over apps that had large amounts of user data, you will ban them and tell those affected. that's appropriate. but it's unlikely to be enough for the two billion facebook users. one reason that so many people are worried about this incident is what it says about how facebook works. the idea that for every person who decided to try an app, information about nearly 300 other people was scraped from your services, to put it mildly, disturbing. and the fact that those 87 million people may have technically consented to making their data available, doesn't make most people feel any better. the recent revolution that malicious actors were able to

utilize facebook's default privacy settings, to match e-mail addresses and phone numbers found in the so-called dark web to public facebook profiles, potentially affecting all facebook users only adds fuel to the fire. what binds these two incidents is that they don't appear to be caused by the type of negligent th that allows it to happen. i know facebook has taken several steps and intends to take more to address these issues. never the less, some have warned that the actions facebook is taking to insure that third parties don't obtain data from users will serve to enhance facebook's own ability to market such data exclusively. most of us understand that whether you're using facebook or

google or some other online services, we are trading certain information about ourselves for free or low cost services. but for this model to persist, both sides of the bargain need to know the stakes that are involved. right now, i'm not convinced that facebook's users have the information that they need to make meaningful choices. in the past, many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech company's efforts to regulate themselves. this may be changing. just last month congress voted to make it easier for prosecutors and victims to go after websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking. this should be a wakeup call for the tech community. we want to hear more without delay about what facebook and other companies plan to do to take greater responsibility for what happens on their platforms. how will you protect users' data

? how will you inform users about the changes you're making? how do you intend to proactively stop harmful conduct instead of being forced to respond to it months or years later? mr. zuckerberg, in many ways you and the company you created, the story that you created represent the american dream. many are incredibly inspired by what you've done. at the same time, you have an obligation and it's to you to insure that that dream doesn't become a privacy nightmare for the scores of people who use facebook. this hearing is an opportunity to speak to those who believe in facebook and to those who are deeply skeptical about it. we are listening. america is listening. and quite possibly, the world is listening, too. >> thank you. now ranking member feinstein.

>> thank you very much, mr. chairman. chairman grassley, chairman thune, thank you both for holding this hearing. mr. zuckerberg, thank you for being here. you have a real opportunity this afternoon to lead the entire technology sector. we have learned over the past few months and we've learned a great deal that's alarming. special counsel muller issued an indictment against the russia based internet research agency and 13 of its employees for interfering operations targeting

the united states. through this 37 page indictment, we learned that the i.r.a. ran a coordinated campaign through 470 facebook accounts and pages. the campaign included ads and false information to create discord and harm to secretary clinton's campaign. the content was seen by 157 million americans. a month later on march 17th, news broke that cambridge analytica exploited the personal information of approximately 50 million facebook users without their knowledge or permission. and last week, we learned that number was even higher. 87 million facebook users who had their private information taken without their consent.

specifically, using a personality quiz he created, a professor collected the information from 300,000 facebook users and collected data on millions of their friends. it appears the information collected included everything these individuals had on their facebook pages. and according to some reports, even included private direct messages between users. the professor is said to have taken data from over 70 million americans. it is also been reported that he sold this data to cambridge analytica for $800,000. cambridge analytica took the data and created a psychological welfare tool to influence united states elections. the ceo declared that cambridge

analytica ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and its data, informed all the strategy for the trump campaign. the reporting has also speculated that cambridge analytica worked with the internet research agency to help russia identify which american voters to target with its propaganda. i'm concerned that press reports indicate facebook learned about this breach in 2015. but it appears not to have taken significant steps to address it until this year. this hearing is important and i appreciate the conversation we had yesterday. i believe that facebook, through your presence here today, and the words you're about to tell us will indicate how strongly your industry will regulate

and/or reform the platforms that they control. i believe this is extraordinarily important. you lead a big company with 27,000 employees. we very much look forward to your comments. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator feinstein. the history and growth of facebook mirrors that of many of our technological giants. founded by mr. zuckerberg in 2004, facebook has exploded over the past 14 years. facebook currently has over 2 billion monthly active users across the world. over 25,000 employees and offices in 13 u.s. cities and various other countries. like their expanding user base, the data collected on facebook users has also skyrocketed. they have moved on from schools, likes, and relationship

statuses. today facebook has access to dozens of data points ranging from ads you've clicked on, events you've attended, and your location based upon your mobile device. it is no secret that facebook makes money off the data to advertising revenue. although, many seem confused by or all together unaware of this act. facebook generated $40 billion in revenue in 2017 with 98% coming from advertising across facebook and instagram. significant data collection is also occurring at google, twitter, apple, and amazon. and even an ever expanding portfolio of products and services offered by these companies grant endless opportunities to collect increasing amounts of information on their customers. as we get more free or extremely

low cost services, the tradeoff for the american consumer is to provide more personal data. the potential for further growth and innovation based on collection of data is unlimitless. the potential for abuse is also significant. while the contours of the cambridge analytica situation are still coming to light, there was clearly a breach of consumer trust and a likely improper transfer of data. the judiciary committee will hold a separate hearing exploring cambridge and other data privacy issues. more importantly, though, these events have ignited a larger discussion on consumers' expectations and the future of data privacy in our society. it is exposed that consumers may not fully understand or

appreciate the extent to which their data is collected, protected, transferred, used, and misused. data has been used in advertising in political campaigns for decades. the amount and type of data obtained, however, has seen a very dramatic change. campaigns including presidents bush, obama, and trump all used these increasing amounts of data to focus on microtargeting and personalization over numerous social media platforms and especially facebook. in fact, president obama's campaign developed an app utilizing the same facebook feature as cambridge analytica to capture the information of not just the app users, but millions of their friends.

the digital director for that campaign for 2012 described the data scraping app as something that would, quote, wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign, end quote. so the effectiveness of these social media tactics can be debat debated. but their use over the past years across the political spectrum and their increased significance cannot be ignored. our policy towards data privacy and security must keep pace with these changes. data privacy should be tethered to consumer needs and expectations. now, at a minimum, consumers must have the transparency necessary to make an informed decision about whether to share their data and how it can be used. consumers ought to have clearer

information, not opaque policies and complex click through consent pages. the tech industry has an obligation to respond to widespread and growing concerns over data privacy and security and to restore the public's trust. the status quo no longer works. moreover, congress must determine if and how we need to strengthen privacy standards to insure transparency and understanding for the billions of consumers who utilize these products. senator nelson? >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, good afternoon. let me just cut to the chase. if you and other social media companies do not get your act in order, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore. that's what we're facing. we're talking about personally

identifiable information that, if not kept by the social media companies from theft, a value that we have in america, being or personal privacy, we won't have it anymore. it's the advent of technology. of course, all of us are a part of it. from the moment that we wake up in the morning until we go to bed, we're on those handheld tablets. and online companies like facebook are tracking our activities and collecting information. facebook has a responsibility to protect this personal information. has a responsibilio protect this personal

information. we had a good discussion yesterday. we went over all of this. you told me that the company had failed to do so. it's not the first time that facebook has mishandled its users information. the ftc found that facebook's privacy policies had deceived users in the past. and in the present case, we recognize that cambridge analytica and an app developer lied to consumers and lied to you, lied to facebook, but did facebook watch over the operations? we want to know that. and why didn't facebook notify 87 million users that their personally identifiable information had been taken? and it was being also used, why

were they not informed for unauthorized political purposes? so only now, and i appreciate our conversation, only now facebook has pledged to inform those consumers whose accounts were >> i think your genuine. conversing with y ight thing. you want to enact reforms. we want to know if it's going to be enough. and i hope that will be in the answers today. now, since we still don't know what cambridge analytica has done with this data, you heard chairman thune say, as we have discussed, we want to haul

cambridge analytica in to answer these questions at a separate hearing. i want to thank you chairman thune for scheduling a hearing. there is obviously a great deal of interest in this subject. i hope we can get to the bottom of this. and if facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix the privacy invasions, then we are going to have to. we, the congress. how can american consumers trust folks like your company to be caretakers of their most personal and identifiable information? and that's the question. thank you. >> thank you, my colleagues, and senator nelson. our witness today is mark zuckerberg. founder, chairman, chief

executive officer of facebook. mr. zuckerberg's launch facebook february 4th, 2004 at the age of 19. and at that time he was a student at harvard university. as i mentioned previously, his company now has over 40 billion of annual revenue and over 2 billion active users. mr. zuckerberg, along with his wife, also established the chan zuckerberg initiative to further philanthropic causes. i now turn to you. welcome to the committee. and whatever your statement is orally, if you have a longer one, it will be included in the record. so proceed, sir. >> chairman grassley, chairman thune, ranking member feinstein and nelson and members of the committee, we face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy.

and you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. before i talk about the steps we are taking to address them, i want to talk about how we got here. facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. for most of our existence we focused on all of the good that connecting people can do. and as facebook has grown people every where have a powerful new tool for staying connected to the people they love. for making their voices heard. and for building businesses ab communities. just recently we have seen the me too movement and march for our lives organize nieded at least in part on facebook. after hurricane harvey people came together to raise money for rewlaef. and more than 70 million small businesses use facebook to create jobs and grow. but it's clear now that we didn't do enough to pro veentd these tools from being used for harm as well. that goes for fake news, foreign

interference in elections, hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. and it was my mistake. and i'm sorry. i started facebook. i run it. and i'm responsible for what happens here. so now we have to go through all of our relationship with people and make sure that we are taking a broad enough view of our responsibility. it's not enough to just connect people. we have make sure those connections are positive. it's not enough to just give people a voice. would he need to make sure that people aren't using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation and not enough to give people control over their information, we need to make sure that the developers they share it with protect their information too. across the board, we have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure that they are used for good.

it will take sometime to work through all the changes we need to make across the company. but 50i78 committi'm getting co getting this right. this includes protecting people's information which we failed to do with cambridge analytica. so here are a few things we are doing to address this and to prevent it from happening again. first, we are getting to the bottom of exactly what cambridge analytica did. and telling everyone affected. what we know now is cambridge analytica improperly accessed some information about millions of facebook members by buying it from an app developer. that information, this was information that people generally share publicly on their facebook pages like names, and their profile pictures and the pages they follow. when we first contacted cambridge analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. about a month ago, we heard new reports that suggested that

wasn't true. and now we are working with the governments in u.s., u.k. and arnds t around the world to make sure they get rid of any data they may have. second o make sure no other app developers are misusing data, we are now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of information in the past. and if we find someone improperly used data we'll ban them from facebook and tell everyone affected. third, to prevent this from ever happening again going forward, we are making sure developers can't access as much information here. the good news here we already made big changes to platform in 2014 that would have prevented this specific situation with cambridge analytica from occurring today. but there is more to do. and you can find more details on the steps we are taking in my written statement. my top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community, and

bringing the world closer together. advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as i'm running facebook. i started facebook when i was in college. we have come a long way since then. we now serve more than 2 billion people around the world and every day people use our services to stay connected with the people that matter to them most. i believe deeply in what we are doing. and i know that when we address these challenges, we'll look back and view helping people connect and giving more people a voice as a positive force in the world. i realize the issues we are talking about today aren't just issues for facebook in our community, this at the are issues and challenges for all of us as americans. thank you for having me here today. and i'm ready to take your questions. >> i'll remind members that maybe weren't here when i had my opening comments, that we are operating

operating ender the five minute rule and that applies to the -- the five minute rule and that applies to those of us chairing the committee has well. i'll start with you. facebook handles extensive amounts of personal data for billions of users. a significant amount of that data is shared with third-party developers who utilize your platform. as of this early this year, you did not actively monitor whether that data was transferred by such developers to other parties. moreover, ayour policies prohibited transfers by developers seeking to profit from such data. number one, besides professor cobegan transfer and now potentially, do you know of any instances where user data was improperly transferred to third party in breach of facebook's

terms? if so, how many times has that happened? and was facebook only made aware of that transfer by some third party? >> mr. chairman, thank you. as i mentioned, we are now conducting a full investigation into every single app that had an access to a large amount of information before we locked down platform to prevent developers from accessing this information in around 2014. we believe that we are going to be investigating many apps, tens of thousands of apps, and if we find any suspicious activity we'll conduct a full audit. and if we find they are doing anything improper we'll ban them from facebook and tell everyone affected. as for past activity, i don't have all the examples of apps that we have banned here, but if you'd like i have can have my team follow up with you after this. >> okay. have you ever required an audit to ensure the deletion of improperly transferred data?

and if so, how many times? >> mr. chairman, yes, we have. i don't have the exact figure how many times we have. but over all, the way we have enforced our platform policies, in the past is we have looked at patterns of how apps have used our apis and accessed information has well as looked into reports that people have told us. going forward we'll take a more pro-active position and do much more regular spot checks and reviews of apps as well as increasing the amounted of a audits we do and we can follow up with anything. >> i can assume sitting here today you have no idea, and if i'm wrong on that, you are telling me, i think, you are able to supply those figures to us at least as of this point?

>> mr. chairman, i'll have my team follow up with you on what information we have. >> but right now you have no certainty how much of that is going on, right? okay. facebook collects massive amounts of data from consumers including content, networks, contact lists, device information, location, and information from third parties. yet your data policy is only a few pages long and provides consumers with only a few examples of what is collected and how it might be used. the examples given emphasized benign uses such as connecting with friends, but your policy does not give any indication for more controversial issues of such data. my question, why doesn't facebook disclose to users all the ways that data might be used by facebook and other third

parties? and what is facebook's responsibility to inform users about that information? >> mr. chairman, i believe it's important to tell people exactly how the information that they sharon facebook is going to be used. that's why every single time you go to share something on facebook, whether it's a photo in facebook, or a message in messenger or what's app, every nal sometime there is a control right there about who you are going to be sharing it with, whether it's your friends or public or specific group, and you can change that and control that in line. to your broader point about the privacy policy. this gets into an issue that i think we and others in the tech in distry have found challenging which is long privacy policies are very confusing. and if you make it long and spell out all the detail, then you'll probably reduce the percent of people who read it and make it accessible to them. so one of the things that we have struggled with over time is to make something that is simple as possible so people can

understand it, as well as giving them controls in line in the product in ts corn text of when they are trying to truly use them. taking into account that we don't expect that most people will want to go through and read a full legal document. >> senator nelson. >> thank you, mr. chairman. yesterday when we talked, i gave the relatively harmless example that i'm communicating with my friends on facebook and indicate that i love a certain kind of chocolate. and all of a sudden i start receiving advertisements for chocolate. what if i don't want to receive those commercial advertisements? so your chief operating officer, miss sandberg, suggested on the

nbc "today" show that facebook users who do not want their personal information used for advertising might have to pay for that protection, pay for it. are you actually considering having facebook users pay for you not to use that information? >> senator, people have a control over how their information is used in ads in the product today. so if you want to have an experience where your ads aren't targeted using all the information that we have available, you can turn off third party information. what we found is that even though some people don't like ads, people really don't like ads that aren't relevant. and while there is some discomfort for sure with using information in making ads more relevant, the overwhelming feedback we get from our

community is that people would rather have us show relevant content there than not. so we offer this control that they are referencing. some people use it. it's not the majority of people on facebook. and i think that that's a good level of control to offer. i think what cheryl was saying was in order to not run ads at all we would need some sort of business model. >> and that is your business model. so i take it that -- and i use the harmless example of chocolate. but if it zbot into more personal things, communicating with friends, and i want to cut it off s i'm going to have to pay you in order not to send me using my personal information something that i don't want. that in essence is what i understood miss san berg to say. is that correct? >> yes, senator.

although to be clear, we don't offer an option today for people to pay to not show ads. we think offering an ad supported service is most aligned with trying 20 connect everyone in the world. because we want to offer a free service everyone can afford. that's only way we can reach buildings of people. >> so therefore you consider my personally identifiable data the company's data, not my data, is that it? >> no, senator. actually, the first line of our terms of service say that you control and own the information and content that you put on facebook. >> well, the recent scandal is obviously frustrating not only because it affected 87 million, but because it seems to be part of a pattern of lax data practices by the company going back years. so back in 2011, it was a settlement with the ftc, and now

we discover yet another instance where the data was failed to be protected. when you discovered the cambridge analytica that had fraudulently obtained all of this information,why didn't you inform those 87 million? >> when we learned in 2015, that cambridge analytica had bought data from an app developer on facebook that people had shared it with, we did take action. we took down the app. and we demanded that both the app developer and cambridge analytica delete and stop using any data that they had. they told us that they did this. in retrospect, it was clearly a mistake to believe them. and we should have followed up and do a full audit then. and that is not a mistake that we will make. >> yes, you did that. and you apologized for it.

but you didn't notify them. and do you think that you have an ethical obligation to notify 87 million facebook users? >> senator, when we heard back from cambridge analytica that they had told us that they weren't using the data and had deleted it, we considered it a closed case. in retrospect, that was clear amiss take, we shouldn't have taken their word for it and we have updated our policies to make sure we don't make that mistake again. >> did anybody notify the ftc? >> no, senator, for the same reason we considered it a closed case. >> senator thune. >> and mr. zuckerberg would you do that differently today presumably, in response to senator nelson's response? >> yes. >> having to do it over. this may be your first appearance before congress, but it's not the first time that facebook has faced tough questions about its privacy policies.

wired magazine noted that you have 14 year history of apologizing for ill advised decisions regarding user privacy not unlike the one that you made just now in your opening statement. after more than a decade of promises to do better, how is today's apology different? and why should we trust facebook to make the necessary changes to ensure user privacy and give people a clearer picture of your privacy policies? >> thank you, mr. chairman. so we have made a the lo of mistakes in running the company. i think it's pretty much impossible, i believe, to start a company in your dorm room and grow it at the scale you are at now without some mistakes. because our service is about helping people connect information, those mistakes have been different, in how they, we try not to make the same mistake multiple times, but in general the mistakes are how people connect to each other just

because of the nature of the service. over all i would say we are going through la broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. for the first ten or 12 years of the company, i viewed our responsibility primarily building tools that if we can put those tools in people's hands, then that would many power people to do good things. what i think we've learned now kroosz an um in of issues, not just data privacy but fake news and interference in elections is we need to take a more pro-active role. not enough to build tools. we need to make sure they are used for good. and that means that we need to now take a more active view in policing the ecosystem and watching and looking out and making sure that all of the members in our community are using these tools in a way that's going to be good and healthy. so at the end of the day, this is going to be something where people measure us by our results on this. it's not that i expect anything i say here today to necessarily

change people's view, but i'm committed to getting this right and i believe that over the coming years once we fully work all these solutions through, people will see real differences. >> okay. well, i'm glad that you all have gotten that message. as we discussed in my office yesterday, the line between legitimate political discourse and hate speech can sometimes be hard to identify. and especially when you are relying on artificial intelligence and other technology for the initial discovery. can you discuss what steps that facebook currently takes when making these evaluations, the challenges that you chase, and any skpexamples where you draw line what is and is not hate speech? >> yes, mr. chairman. i'll speak to hate speech, then i'll talk about enforcing our policies more broadly. so actually maybe if you are okay with it, i'll go in the other order. so from the beginning of the company, in 2004, i started in

my dorm room, it was me and my roommate, we didn't have ai technology that could look at content people were sharing. so we basically had to enforce our content policies reactively. people could share what they wanted, and then if someone in the community found it to be offensive origins our policies they would flag it for us and we would look at it reactively. now increasingly we are developing ai stools that -- ai tools and flag it at facebook. by the and of this year we'll have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review working across all these things. so when content gets flagged to us we have those people look at t and if it violates our policies then we take it undo. some problems lend themselves more easily to ai solutions than others. so hate speech is one of the hardest because determining if something is hate speech is very

linguistically nuanced. you need to understand what is a slur and whether something is hateful. not just in english, but majority of people on facebook use it in language different across the world. contrast for example with an area like finding terrorist propaganda which we've been very successful at deploying ai tools on already. today as we sit here 99% of the isis and al qaeda contempt we take down, ai flags before any human sees it. so that's success in terms of rolling out ai tools that can pro hack tively police and enforce safety across the community. hate speech i'm optimistic that over a five to ten year period we'll have ai tools that can get into some of the nuances, linguistic nuisances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems so today wie are

not there yet. so a lot of this is reactive. people flag it to us. we have people look at it. we have policies. but until we guilty it more automated there is error rate i'm not happy with. >> thank you. >> mr. zuckerberg, what is facebook doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in u.s. elections? >> thank you, senator. ment this is one of my top priorities in 2018 is to get this right. one of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the russian information operations in 2016. we expected them to do a number of more traditional cyberattacks which we did identify and notify. but we were slow new operations. >> when did you identify new operations? >> it was right around the time of the 2016 election itself.

so since then, we -- 2018 is incredibly important year for elections not jusz with u.s. midterms but around the world important elections in india, in brazil, mexico, and pakistan, and in hungary that we want to make sure we ask do everything we can to protect the integrity of those elections. i have more kfd we'll get this right bausz since 2016 election there have been several important elections around the world better record. french election, u.s. senate alabama special election last year. >> explain what is better about the record. >> so we have deployed new ai tools that do a better job of identifying fake news that maybe trying to interfere in elections orr spread miss election. between those elections we were able to pro-actively remove tens of thousands of accounts before they could contribute significant harm. and the nature of these attacks,

though, is that there are people in russia whose job it is is to try 20 exploit our systems and other internet systems as well sochlt this is an arms race. they are going to keep on getting better at this and we need to invest at getting better at this too. which is why one of the things i mentioned before we'll have more than 20,000 people by the and of this year working on security and content review across the company. >> speak for a moment on automated bots that spread disinformation. what are you doing to punish those who exploit your platform in that regard? >> well, you are not allowed to have a fake account on facebook. your content has to be authentic. so we build technical tools to try to identify when people are creating fake accounts, especially large networks of fake accounts like the russians have, in order to remove all of that content. after the 2016 election, our top priority was protecting the integrity of other elections around the world.

but at the same time, we had a parallel effort to trace back to russia the ira activity, internet research activity, that was part of the russian government that did this activity in 2016, and just last week we were able to determine that a number of russian media organizations sanctioned by the russian regulator were operated and controlled by this internet research agency. so we took the step last week, it was a pretty big step for us, of taking down sanctioned news organizations in russian as part of an operation to remove 270 fake accounts and pages part of broader network m russian, that was actually not targeting international interference -- sorry let me correct that. primarily targeting spreading misinformation in russia itself as well as certain russian speaking neighboring countries. >> how many accounts of this type have you taken down? >> across in the ira

specifically, ones we have pegged backs totd ira, we can identify 470. in the american elections and 270 we specifically went after in russian last week. there were many others that our systems catch, which are more difficult to attribute specifically to return intelligence. but the number would be in the tens of thousands of fake accounts that we remove. and i'm happy to have my team follow up with you on more information that that would be helpful. >> would you please? i think this is very important. if you knew in 2015 that cambridge analytica was using the information of professor cobegan, why didn't facebook ban cambridge analytica in 2015? why did you wait? >> senator, that's a great question. cambridge analytica wasn't using our services in 2015, as we can tell. so this is clearly one of the questions that i asked our team as soon as we learned about this, why did we wait until we

found out the reports last month to ban them? it's because as of the time that we learned about their activity in 2015, they weren't advertiser, they weren't running pages, so we actually had nothing to ban. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator feinstein. now senator hatch. >> well, in my opinion this is the most intense public scrutiny i've seen for tech related hearing since the microsoft hearing that i chaired back in the late 1990s. the recent stories about cambridge analytica and data mining on social media has raised serious concerns about consumer privacy. naturally you know that 2e same time these story ss touch on the internet economy. and the way the websites that drive our internet economy make money. some have shocked, shocked the companies like facebook and google share user data with

advertisers. did any of them individuals ask themselves why facebook and google don't charge for access? nothing in life is free. everything involves tradeoffs. if you want something without having to pay money for it, you'll have to pay for it in some other way it seems to me. that's what we are seeing here. and these great websites that don't charge for access, they extract value in some other way. and nothing wrong with that as long as they are up front about what they are doing. to my mind, the issue here is transparency. it's consumer choice h do users understand what they are agreeing to when they access a website or agree to terms of service? are websites up front about how they extract value from rusers or do they hide the ball? do consumers have the nchks they need to make an informed choice regarding whether or not to visit a particular website? to my mind, these are questions

we should ask or be focusing on. now, mr. zuckerberg, i remember well your first visit to capitol hill back in 2010. you spo he can to the senate republican high tech task force which i chair, you said back then that facebook would always be free. is that still your objective? >> senator, yes. there will always be aversion of facebook that is free. it is our mission to help connect everyone around the world and bring the world closer together. in order to do that we believe we need to offer a service everyone can afford and we are committed to doing that. >> if so how do you sustain a business model that people don't pay for your services? >> sfloenator, rerun ads. >> i see. that's great. whenever a controversy like this arises always a danger that congress response will be to step in and over regulate. that's been experience that i've had in my 42 years here. in your view, what sorts of

legislative changes would help to solve the problems that cambridge analytica story has revealed and what sortsds of legislative changes would not help to solve this issue? >> senator, i think there are a few categories of legislation that make sense to committee. around privacy specifically, there are few principles that i think 2 would be useful to discuss and potentially codify into law. one is around strg a simple and practical set of ways that you explain what you are doing with data. we talked a little earlier around the complexity of laying out these long privacy policy. it's hard to say that people fully understand something when it's only written out in long legal document. the stuff needs to be implemented in a way that people can actually understand it where consumers can understand it. but that can also capture all the nuisances of how these

services work in a way that's not overly restrictive on providing the services. that's one. the second is around giving people complete control. this is the most important principle for facebook. every piece of content that you sharon facebook, you own, and you have complete control over who sees it, and how you share it. and you can remove it at any time. that's why every day about 100 billion times a day people come to one of our services and either post a photo or send a message to someone, because they know that they have that control and that who they say it's go go to go to is going to be who sees the contempt. i think that control is something that's important. that i think should ha ply to every service. >> go ahead. >> the third point is around innovating any ovation. because some of the use cases that are very sensitive like face recognition for example. and i this i there is a balance

that's extremely important to strike here. where you obtain special consent for sensitive features like face recognition, but we still need to make it so american companies can innovate in those areas or else we'll fall behind chinese competitors and others around the world who have different regimes for different new features like that. >> senator cantwell. >> thank you, mr. chairman. wel welcome, mr. zuckerberg. do you know who pal a tier is? >> i do. >> some people have referred to them as a stanford and anayltica. do you agree? >> senator, i have not heard that. >> do you think they taught cambridge analytica press report saying how to do these tactics? >> senator, i don't know. >> do you think that pal a tier

has ever scraped data from facebook. >> senator, i'm not aware of that. >> okay. do you think that during the 2016 campaign as cambridge analytica was providing support to the trump campaign under project alamo, were there any facebook people involved in that sharing of technique and information? >> senator, we provided support to the trump campaign similar to what we provide to any advertiser or campaign who asks for it. >> so that was a yes? is that a yes? >> senator, can you repeat the specific question? i want to make sure i get specifically what you are asking. >> during the 2016 campaign, cambridge analytica worked with the trump campaign to refine tactics and were facebook employees involved in that? >> senator, i don't know that our employees were involved with

cambridge analytica. although i know we did help out the trump campaign overall in sales support the same wie we do with other campaigns. >> so tle may have been involved in working together doourg that time period? maybe that's something your investigation will find out? >> senator, i can certainly have my team get back to you on any specifics there that i don't know sitting here today. >> have you total information awareness, do you know what i'm talking about? >> no, i do not. >> total information awareness wa was 2013, john ashcraft trying to get information to influence a process. so when i look at pal and tier and what they are doing and look at what's app which is another acquisition, and look at where you are from the 2011 consent decree, and where you are today,

i am thinking is this guy out foxing the foxes or? or is he going along with what is a major trend in an information age to try to harvest information for political forces? and so my question to you is, do you see that those applications that those companies palanter and even what's app will fall into? >> senator, i'm not sure specifically. overall, i do think these issues around information access are challenging. to the specifics about those apps i'm not really familiar with what they do. what's app collects very little information and is less likely to have the kind of issues because of the way that the services architected. but certainly these are broad

issues across the tech industry. >> well i guess i hagiven the t record i guess people would say they didn't act boldly enough. and the fact that people like john bolton basically was an investor in "new york times" article earlier i guess it was actually last month that the bolton pack was obsessed how america was getting limp wristed and spine less and wanted it for national security issues. so the fact that there are a lot of people 40 are interested in this larger effort. and what i think my constituents want to know is was this discussed at your board meetings? and what are the applications and interests that are being discussed without putting real teeth into this? we don't want to come back to this situation again. i believe you have all the

talent. my question is whether you have all the will to help us solve this problem. >> yes, senator. so data privacy and foreign interference in elections are certainly topics that we have discussed at the board meeting. these are some of the i go best issues the company has faced and we feel a huge responsibility to get these right. >> do you believe the european regulations should be applied here in the u.s.? >> senator, i think everyone in the world deserves good privacy protection. and regardless of whether we implement the exact same implementation, i guess it would be somewhat different because we have different things in the u.s. versus other countries. we are committed to rolling out the controls and an affirmative consent and special controls are on sensitive types of technology like face recognition that are required in gdpr, we are doing

that around the world. so i think it's certainly worth discussing, whether we should have something similar in the u.s., but what i would like to say today is we are going to go forward and in pla meant that regard lel of what the regulatory outcome is. >> senator wicker. senator thune, will chair next. senator wicker. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and mr. zuckerberg thank you for being with us. my question is going to be sort of a follow up on what senator hatch was talking about. and let me agree with basically his advice that we don't want to over regulate to the point where we are stifling innovation and investment. i understand with regard to suggested rules or suggested legislation that at least two schools of thought out there. one would be the isps, internet service providers, who are

advocating for privacy protections for consumers that apply to all online entities equally across the entire internet ecosystem. now, facebook is an edge provider on the other hand. it's my understanding that many edge providers such as facebook may not support that effort because edge providers have different business models than the isps and should not be considered like services. so do you think we need consistent privacy protections for consume errs across the internet system being collected or used or shared regardless of the entity doing the collecting or using or sharing? >> senator, this is important issue. i would differentiate between

ir isps which i consider to be the pipes and google which are the apps on top of that. i think in general the expectations people have of the pipes are somewhat different from the platforms so there might be 'areas where there needs to be more regulation in one and less in the other. but i think there are going to be other places more regulation in of the other type. specifically, though, on the pipes, one of the important issues that i think we face and have debated -- >> when you say pipes. >> isps. >> isp is. >> yes. and i know net neutrality has been hotly debated topic. and one of the reasons i've been out there saying i think that should be the case is because i like at my own story when i was getting started building facebook at harvard, i only had one option for isp to use, and if i had to pay extra in order to make it so that my app could potentially be senior used by

other people, then we probably wouldn't be here today. >> well, but we are talking about privacy concerns. and let me just say we'll have to follow up on this. but i think you and i agree this is going to be one of the major items of debate if we have to go forward and do this from governmental standpoint. let me just move on to another couple of items. is it true that as was recently pub listed that facebook collects the call and text histories of its users that use android phones? >> senator, we have an app called messenger, for sending messages tour facebook friends, and that app offers people an option to sync so you can have one app that has both your texts and facebook messages in one place. we also allow people the

option -- >> you can opt in who out of that? >> yes. >> is it easy to opt out? >> you have to affirmatively say you want to synk. >> unless you opt in you don't collect that call and text history? >> that is correct. >> is that true for -- is this practice done at all with miners or do you make an exception there with persons age 13 to 17? >> i do not know. we can follow up 0en that. >> let's do that. one other thing. there have been reports that facebook can track users internet browsing activity even after that user has logged off of the facebook platform. can you confirm whether or not this is true? >> senator, i want to make sure i get this accurate so probably better to have my team follow up. >> so you don't know? >> i know that people use cookies on the internet. and that you can probably

correlate activity between sessions. we do that for a number of reasons. including security and including measuring ads to make sure that the ad experience are the most effect 2i6 of course people can opt out of. so let me follow up. >> when you get back to me, sir, would you also let us know how facebook's discloses to its users that engaging in this type of tracking gives us that result? >> yes. >> and thank you very much. >> thank you. senator wicker. senator lay he is up next. >> thank you. mr. zuckerberg, i assume facebook has been served subpenas from the special counsel's office. is that correct? >> yes. >> have you or anyone at facebook been interviewed by the special counsel's office?

>> yes. >> have you been interviewed? >> i have not. i have not. >> others have? >> i believe so. and i want to be careful here. because our work with the special counsel is confidential and i want to make sure in an open session i'm not revealing something that's confidential. >> i understand. that's why i made clear that you have been contacted. you have had subpoenas. >> actually, let me clarify that i actually am not aware of a subpoena. i bloo eve there may be. but i know we are, would go with them. >> thank you. six months ago your general counsel promised us you were taking steps to prevent facebook for serving what i call unwitting coconspiracy russian interference. but these unverified divisive pages are on facebook today. they look a lot like russian

agents used to spread propaganda during the 2016 election. are you able to confirm whether they are russian groups, yes or no? >> senator, are you asking about those specifically? >> yes. >> senator, last week we actually announced a major change to our ads and pages policies that we will be verifying the identity of every single advertiser. >> asking about this specific one's. do you know whether they are? >> i'm not familiar with those pieces of contempt specifically. >> if you announced this ha week ago you would be able to verify them? >> we are working on that now. what we are doing is verify the identity of any advertiser running a political or issue related ad, this is basically what the act is proposing and we are following that. we are also going to do that for

pages. >> but you can't answer on these? >> i'm not familiar with those specific cases. >> will you find out the answer and get back to me. >> i'll have my team get back to you. i do think it's worth adding, though, that we are dwog to do the same verification of the identity and location of admin it is running large pages. so that way even if they aren't going to be buying ads in our system, that will make it significantly harder for russian interference efforts or other efforts to try to spread misinformation through the network. >> i'm surprised going on for the long time. six months ago i asked general counsel about facebook role as breeding ground for hate speech against rohingya refugees. recently you went and investigated blamed facebook for playing a role inciting possible genocide in myanmar and there has been genocide there.

are you saying you used ai to find this. this is a type of content i'm referring to. it calls for the death of a muslim journalist. now, that threat went straight through your detection systems. spread very quickly. and then it took attempt after attempt after attempt, and the involvement of civil society groups to get you to remove it. why count it ld it not it be re within 24 hours? >> senator, what is happening is terrible tragedy and we need to do more. >> we all agree with that. but you and investigators have blamed -- you have blamed facebook for playing a role in the between owe side. we all agree it's terrible. how can you dedicate and will you dedicate resources to make sure such hate speech is taken down within 24 hours? >> yes.

we are, would go working on the specific things we are doing. one, we are hiring more burmese language content reviewers. because it's language specific and hard to do it without people speak the local language. second, we are working with civil society in myanmar to specify very figures. third, we are product team to do changes in myanmar and other countries to prevent this from happening. >> senator cruz and i sent a letter to apple asking what they are going to do about chinese censorship. my question i'll place -- >> thank you. >> for the record i want to know what you'll do about chinese censorship when they come to you. >> senator graham is up next.

>> thank you. are you familiar with andrew boswell? >> yes, senator, i am. >> he said, so we connect more people, maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack, coordinated on our tools. the ugly truth is we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is defacto no good. do you agree with that? >> no, senator, i do not. has context, boz wrote that, he wrote that as internal note. we have a lot of discussion internally. i disagreed with it at the time that he wrote with it. if you look at the comments vast majority did too. >> can i say you did a poor job of ceo. because if he understood are you

were at you would have never said it to begin with. >> well, senator, we try to run our company in a way that people can express different machinopi internally. >> well this is sa opinion that disturbs me and if somebody worked for me said this i would fire him. who is your biggest competitor? >> senator, we have a lot of competitors. >> who is your biggest? >> i think the categories, did you want one? i i'm not sure i can give one. but can i give a bunch? >> uh-huh. >> three categories i would focus on. one are the other tech plt foorms, google, apple, microsoft, we overlap. >> do they provide the same service you provide? >> in different ways, different parts of it, yes. >> let me put it this way. if i buy afford and it doesn't work well and i don't like it i can buy achieve have i. if i'm upset with facebook, what's the equivalent product that i can sign up for? >> well, the second category that i was going to talk about.

>> i'm talking about real competition you face. because car companies face a lot of competition. if they make a defective car, gets out in the world, people stop bying that car and buy another one. is there an alternative to facebook in the private sector? >> yes, senator. the average american uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends and stay in touch with people. >> okay. >> ranging from text. >> which is the same service you provide? >> we provide a number of different services. >> is twitter the same? >> it overlaps what a portion of what we do. >> you don't feel you have a monopoly. >> certainly doesn't feel 245 way to 3450e. >> -- to me. >> so it doesn't. so you bought instagram? j did you buy them? >> because tle were talented app developers making good use of our platform and understood our values. >> good business decision. my point is it one way to regulate is through competition,

government regulation. here's the question that all of us have an answer. what do we tell our constituents given what's happened here why you should self regulate? what would you people people in south carolina given all the things we've just discovered here it's a good idea for us to rely upon you to regulate your own business practices? >> well, senator, my position is not that there should be no regulation. >> okay. >> i think the internet -- >> do you embrace regulation? zbli think the real question has the internet becomes more important in people's lives what is the right regulation? >> but you as a company welcome regulation? >> i think if it's a right regulation then yes. >> do you tli the europeans have it right? >> i think they is get things right. >> have you ever submitted -- >> that's true. so would you work with us in terms of what regulations you think are necessary in your industry? >> absolutely. >> okay. would you submit to us some

proposed regulations? >> yes. and i'll have my team follow up with you so we can have this discussion. >> look forward to it. when you sign up for facebook, you sign up for terms of service. are you familiar with that? >> yes. >> okay. it says the terms govern your use of facebook and features, technology, software we offer facebook products are products september where expressly states separate terms. i'm a lawyer and have no idea what this means. but bh you look at terms of service this is what you get. do you believe the average consumer understands what they are signing up for? >> i don't think the average person likely reads that whole document. but there are different ways we can commune date 245 and have a responsibility 20 do so. >> do you zbree with me you better come up with different ways? because this ain't working. >> well, senator, i think in certain areas that is true. and i this i in other areas like

the core part of what we do. if you think about the most basic level, people come to facebook, instagram, what's up messenger about 100 billion times a day to share a message with specific set of people. and i think that basic function amount peel understand because we have the controls in line every time. and given the volume of the activity and the value that people tell us they are getting from that, i think that that control in line seems to be working fairly well. we can always do better. and other services are complex and more to it than just, you know, you go and post a photo. so i agree that in many places we can could 0 do better. but for the core of the service it actually is quite clear. >> thank you, senator graham. >> senator klobuchar. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg i think we all agree what happened here was bad, you acknowledged it was a breach of trustment and way i explained to my constituents if

someone breaks into my apartment with crowbar and take my stuff, it's just like if the manager gach th game they have the keys, it's still a break in, and i believe we need to have rules and laws sophisticated as the brilliant products that you've developed here. and we just haven't done that yet. and one of the areas that i focused on is the election. and i appreciate the support that you and facebook and now twitter have given to the honest ads haktd bill that you mentioned that i'm leading with senator mccain and senator warner. and i just want to be clear as we work to pass this law, so that q3 have the same rules in place to disclose political adds and issue ads as we do for tv and radio has well as dpis claimers, that you'll take early action as as soon as june i heard before this election so that people can view these ads including issue ads. is that correct? >> that is correct, senator. and i just want to make ta tom

petty beforedsh-this is an impo issue for the whole industry to move on. the two specific things that we are doing are one is around transparency. so now you are going to be able to go and click on any advertiser on any page and see all of the ads they are running sochlt that brings tdsing online on facebook to higher standards than what you would have on tv or print media because no where you can see all of the tv ads that someone is running, for example, where you will see be able to see on facebook whether this campaign or third party is saying different messages to different types of people. that's an important element of transparency. the other important piece is they are seeing every advertiser that is appreciate that, and senator warner and i have also called on google and the other platforms to do the same so memo

to the rest of you. we have to get this done or we'll have a patchwork of ads, and i hope that you'll be working with us to pass this bill, is that right? >> we will. >> okay. thank you. now on the subject of cambridge analytica, were these people, the 87 million people, users, concentrated in certain states? are you able to figure out where they are from? >> i do not have that information with me, but we can follow up with your office. >> okay. because as we know the election was close and it was only thousands of votes in certain states. you've also estimated that roughly 126 million people may have been shown content from a facebook page associated with the internet research agency. have you determined whether any of those people were the same facebook users whose data was shared with cambridge analytica? are you able to make that determination? >> senator, we're investigating that now. we believe that it is entirely

possible that there will be a connection there. >> okay. that seems like a big deal as we look back at that last election. former cambridge analytica employee christopher wiley has said that the data that it improperly obtained, that cambridge analytica improperly obtained from facebook users could be stored in russia. do you agree that that's a possibility? >> sorry. are you asking if cambridge analytica's data could be stored in russia? >> that's what he said this weekend on a sunday show. >> senator, i don't have any specific knowledge that would suggest that, but one of the steps that we need to take now is go do a full audit of all of cambridge analytica's systems to understand what they are doing, whether they still have any data to make sure that they remove all the data. if they don't, we'll take legal action against them to do so. that audit we have temporarily ceded that in order to let the uk government complete their government investigation first, because, of course, the

government investigation takes precedence over a company doing that, but we're committed to completing this full audit and getting to the bottom of what's going on here so that way we can have more answers to this. >> you earlier stated publicly and here that you would support some privacy rules so that everyone's playing by the same rules here, and you also said here that you should have notified customers earlier. do you support a rule that would require you to notify your users of a breach within 72 hours? >> senator, that makes sense to me, and i think we should have our team follow up with yours to discuss the details around that more. >> thank you. i just think part of this is when people don't even know that their data has been breached, that's a huge problem, and i also think we get to solutions faster when we get that information out there. thank you, and we look forward to passing this bill. we'd love to pass it before the election on the honest ads, and we're looking forward to better

disclosure this election. thank you. >> thank you, senator klobuchar. senator blount is up next. >> nice to see you. i saw you not too long after i entered the senate in 2011. i told you when i sent my business cards down to be printed. they came back from the senate print shop with the message that it was the first business card they had ever printed a facebook address on. there are days when i've regretted that, but more days when we get lots of information that we need to get. there are days when i wonder if the facebook friends is a little misstated. it doesn't seem like i have those every single day, but, you know, the platform you've created is really important, and my son charlie who is 13 is dedicated to instagram so he'd want to be sure i mentioned him while i'm here with you. i haven't print that had on my card yet, i will say that, but i think we have that account as well. lots of ways to connect people,

and the information obviously is an important commodity and it's what makes your business work. i get that. however, i wonder about some of the collection efforts, and maybe we can go through largely just even yes and no and then we'll get back to a more expansive discussion of this, but do you collect user data through cross-device tracking? >> senator, i believe we do link people's accounts between devices in order to make sure that their facebook and ingram and oth could be synced through other devices. >> this is offline, tracking, not necessarily linked to facebook but linked to some device they went through facebook on, is that right? >> senator, i want to make sure that we get this right so i want to have my team follow up with that afterwards. >> that doesn't seem that complicated to me. now, you understand this better

than i do, but maybe you can explain to me why that's complicated. do you track devices that an individual who uses facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their facebook connection but not necessarily connected to facebook? >> i'm not -- i'm not sure of the answer to that question. >> really? >> yes. there may be some data that is necessary to provide the service that we do, but i don't -- i don't have that sitting here today so that's something that i would want to follow up on. >> now the ftc last year flagged cross-device tracking as one of their concerns generally that people are tracking devices that the users of something like facebook don't know they are being tracked. how do you disclose collection methods? is that all in this document that i would see and agree to

before i entered into facebook partnership? >> yes, senator. there are two ways that we do this. we try to be exhaustive in the legal documents around the terms of service and privacy policies, but more importantly we try to provide in-line controls so that people that are plain english that people can understand. they can go to settings or show them at the top of the app periodically so that people understand all the controls and settings they have and can configure their experience the way that they want. >> so do people -- people now give you permission to track specific devices in their contract, and if they do, is that a relatively new addition to what you do? >> senator, i'm sorry, i don't have that. >> am i able to opt out? am i okay to say it's okay for you to track what i'm saying on facebook but i don't want you to track what i'm texting to somebody else off facebook on an

android? >> oh, okay. yes, senator. in general facebook is not collecting data from other apps that you use. there may be specific things about the device that you are using that facebook needs to understand in order to offer the service, but if you're using google or you're using some texting app, unless you specifically opt in that you want to share the texting app information, facebook wouldn't see that. >> has it always been that way, or is that a recent addition to how you deal with those other ways that people might communicate? >> senator, my understanding is that that is how the mobile operating systems are architected. >> so you don't have bundled permissions for how i can agree

to what devices i may use that you may have contact with? do you bundle that permission, or am i able to individually say what i'm willing for you to watch and what i don't want you to watch, and i think we may have to take that for the record based on everybody else's time. >> thank you, senator blunt. next up, senator durbin. thank you very much, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? >> no. >> if you've messaged this week this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged? >> senator, no, i would probably not choose to do that publicly here. >> i think that may be what this is all about. your right to privacy.

the limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of, quote, connecting people around the world. question basically of what information facebook is collecting, who they are sending it to and whether they ever asked me in advance my permission to do that. is that a fair thing for a user of facebook to expect? >> yes, senator. i think everyone should have control over how their information is used, and as we've talked about in some of the other questions, i think that that is laid out in some of the documents, but more importantly you want to give people control in the product itself so the most important way that this happens across our services is that every day poem come to our services to choose to share photos and send messages, and every single time they choose to share something they have a control right there about who they want to share it with, but that level of control is extremely important.

>> they certainly know within the facebook pages who their friends are, but they may not know, as has happened, and you've conceded this point in the past, that sometimes that information is going way beyond their friends and sometimes people have made money off of sharing that information, correct? >> senator, you're referring i think to our developer platform, and it may be useful for me to give some background on how we set that up if that's useful. >> i have three minutes left so maybe you can do that for the record because i have a couple other questions that i would like to ask. you have recently announced something that is called messenger kids. facebook created an app allowing kids between the ages of 6 and 12 to send video and text messages through facebook as an extension you have their parents' account. you have cartoon-like stickers and other things designed to appeal to little kids, first

graders, kindergarteners. on january 30th the campaign for free childhood and lots of other childhood development warned facebook, pointing to a wealth of research, demonstrating excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to kids and argued that young children simply are not ready to handle social media accounts at age 6. in addition, there are concerns about data that's being gathered about these kids. now, there's certain limit in the law we know. children's online privacy protection act. what guarantees can you give us that any data from messenger kids is or will be collected or shared with those that might violate that law? >> all right. senator, so a number of things i think are important here. the background on messenger kids is we heard feedback from thousands of parents that they want to be able to stay in touch with their kid and call them, use apps like facetime when they are working late and not around with their kids and want to have

complete control over, that so i think we can all agree when your kid is 6 or 7, even if they have access to a phone you want to be control everyone who they can contact, and there wasn't an app out there that did that so we built this service to do that. the app collects a minimum amount of information that is necessary to operate the service, so, for example, the messages that people send is something that we collect in order to operate the service, but in general that data is not going to be shared with third parties. it is not connected to the broader facebook -- >> excuse me, as a lawyer i picked up on that record in general, that phrase in general. it seems to suggest that in some circumstances it will be shared with third parties. >> no. it will not. >> all right. would you be open to the idea that someone having reached adult age having grown up with messenger kids should be allowed to delete the data that you've collected? >> senator, yes. as a matter of fact, when you become 13, which is our legal

limit or limit -- we don't people under the age of 13 to use facebook. you don't automatically go from having a messenger kids account to a facebook account. you have to start over and get a facebook account so i think that's a god idea to consider making sure that all that information is deleted and in general people are going to be starting over when they get their facebook or other accounts. >> i'll close because i just have a few seconds of the illinois has a biometric information privacy act, our state does, which is to regulate the commercial use of facial, voice, finger and iris scans and the like. we're now in a fullsome debate on that and facebook has come down on a position trying to carve out exceptions and i hope you'll fill me in on how that is consistent with protecting privacy. >> thank you. senator cornin'. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg for being here. i note up until 2014 the mantra or motto of facebook was move fast and break things.

is that correct? >> i don't know when we changed it, but the mantra is currently move fast with less infrastructure. which is a much less sexy mantra. >> during the time it was facebook's mantra to move fast and break things. do you think some of the misjudgments, perhaps mistakes that you've admitted to here were as a result of that culture or attitude particularly as regards to personal privacy of the information of your subscribers? >> senator, i do think that we made mistakes because of that, but the broadest mistakes that we made here are not taking a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that wasn't -- the move fast cultural value is more tactical around whether engineers can ship things and different ways that we operate, but i think the big

mistake that we've made looking back on this is viewing our responsibility as just building tools rather than viewing our whole responsibility as making sure that those tools are used for good. >> well, and i appreciate that because previously early in the past we've been told that platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram or like are neutral platforms and the people who own and run those for profit, and i'm not criticizing doing something for profit in this country, but they bore no responsibility for the content. you agree now that facebook and other social media platt forms are not neutral platforms but bear some responsibility for the content? >> i agree that we're responsible for the content. and i think that there's -- one of the big societal questions that i think we're going to need

to answer is the current framework that we have is based on this reactive model that assumed that there weren't ai tools that could proactively tell, you know, whether something was terrorist content or something bad, so it naturally relied on requiring people to flag for a company and then the company needed to take reasonable action. in the future we're going to have tools that are going to be able to identify more types of bad content, and i think that there's -- there are moral hand legal obligation questions that i think we'll have to wrestle with as a society about whether we want to require companies to take action proactively on certain of those things and how that gets -- >> i appreciate that. i have two minutes left to ask you questions. so you -- interestingly the terms of the -- what do you call it, the terms of service is a legal document which discloses to your subscribers how their information is going to be used, how facebook is going to operate, and you concede that

you doubt everybody reads or understands that legalese, those terms of service, so is that to suggest that the consent that people give subject to that terms of service is not informed consent? in other words, they may not read it, and even if they read it they may not understand it? >> i just think we have are a broader responsibility than what the law requires, so -- >> no, i'm talking -- i appreciate that. what i'm asking about in terms of what your subscribers understand in terms of how their data is going to be used, but let me go to the terms of service under paragraph number 2 you say you own all of the content and information you post on facebook. that's what you've told us here today a number of times. so if i choose to terminate my

facebook account, can i bar facebook or any third parties from using the data that i had previously supplied for any purpose whatsoever? >> yes, senator. if you delete your account, we should get rid of all of your information. >> you should or do you? >> we do. >> how about third parties that you have contracted with to use some of that underlying information perhaps to target advertising for themselves? you can't -- do you claw back that information as well, or does that remain in their -- >> senator, this is actually a very important question and i'm glad you brought this up because there's a misperception of facebook that we sell data to advertisers. we do not sell data to advertisers. >> you clearly rent it. >> what we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach and then we do the placement. so if an advertiser comes to us and says, all right. i'm a ski shop and i want to sell skis to women, then we

might have some sense because people shared skiing-related contempt or said they were interested in that. they shared whether they are a woman and then we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser. that's a very fundamental part of how our model works and something that is often misunderstood so i appreciate that you brought that up. >> thank you, senator cornyn. >> we indicated early on we would take a couple of breaks to give our witness an opportunity, and i think we've been going now for just under two house, so i think -- >> i can do a few more. you want to keep going? >> maybe is a minutes. does that work? >> all right. we'll keep going. senator blumenthal is up next, and we will commence. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you for being here today, mr. zuckerberg. you have told us today and you've told the world that

facebook was deceived by alexander kogan when he sold user information to cambridge analytica, correct? >> yes. >> i want to show you the terms of service that alexander kogan provided to facebook. and note for you that in fact facebook was on notice that he could sell that user information. have you seen these terms of service before? >> i have not. >> who in facebook was responsible for seeing those terms of service that put you on notice that that information could be sold? >> senator, our app review team would be responsible for that. >> has anyone been fired on that app review team? >> senator, not because of this.

>> doesn't that term of service conflict with the ftc order that facebook was under at that very time that this term of service was in fact provided to facebook, and you'll note that -- that the ftc order specifically requires facebook to protect privacy. isn't there a conflict there? >> it certainly appears that we should be aware that this individual submitted terms that were in conflict with the platform. >> it was willful blindness, heedless and reckless which amounted to a violation of the ftc consent decree.

would you agree? >> no, senator. it's not my understanding in a this was a violation of the consent decree, but as i've said a number of times today i think we need to take a broader view of our responsibility than just what is mandated in the current laws. >> well, here's my reservation, mr. zuckerberg, and i apologize for interrupting you, but my time is limited. we've seen the apology tours before. you have refused to acknowledge even an ethical oblcation to have reported this violation of the ftc consent decree, and we have letters and contact with facebook employees, and i'm going to submit a letter from the record from sandy parakilles with your per miss that indicates a lack of resources and a lack of attention to privacy. and so my reservation about your

testimony today is that i don't see how you can change your business model unless there are specific rules of the road. your business model is to monetize user information and maximize contempt over privacy, and unless there are specific rules and requirements enforced by an outside agency, i have no assurance that these kinds of vague commitments are going to produce action. so i want to ask you a couple of very specific questions, and they are based on legislation that i've offered, the my data app legislation that senator marquee is introducing today, the consent act which i'm joining. don't you agree that companies ought to be required to provide users with clear plain information about how their data

will be used an specific ability to consent to the specific use of that information? >> senator, i do generally agree with what you're saying and i laid that out earlier when i talked about what -- >> would you agree to an opt-in as opposed to an opt out? >> senator, i think that that certainly makes sense to discuss, and i think the details around this matter a lot -- >> would you agree that users should be able to access all of their information? >> senator, yes, of course. >> all of the information that you collect as a result of prchgs it fr purchasing it from data brokers as well as tracking them. >> we already have a download your information tool that allows you to see and take out all the information that they have put into facebook or that facebook knows about them. yes, agree with that.

we already have that. >> i have a number of other specific requests that you agree to support as part of legislation. i think legislation is necessary. the rules of the record have to be the result of congressional action. we have -- facebook has participated recently in the fight against the scourge of sex trafficking and the bill that we've just passed. it will be signed into law tomorrow. the stop exploiting sex trafficking act was as a result of our cooperation and i hope we can cooperate on this kind of measure as well. >> senator, i look forward to having my team work with you on this. >> thank you, senator blumenthal. >> senator cruz. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, welcome. thanks for being here. mr. zuckerberg, does facebook consider itself a neutral public forum? >> senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas. >> let me ask the question

again. does facebook consider itself to be a neutral public for number? are you a first amendment speaker expressing your view or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak? >> senator, here's how we think about this. i don't believe that -- there are certain content that clearly we do not hall lou, right. hate speech, terrorist content, nudity, anything that makes people feel unsafe in the community. from that perspective that's why we generally try to refer to what we do as a platform for all ideas. >> the time is constrained. it's just a simple question. the predicate for section it 30 immunity under the cda is that you're a neutral public forum. do you consider yourself a neutral public forum or are you engaged in political speech which is your right under the first amendment in. >> well, senator, our goal is certainly not to engage in political speech. i'm not that familiar with the specific legal language of the

law that you speak to so i -- i would need to follow up with you on that. i'm just trying to lay out how broadly i think about this. >> mr. zuckerberg, i would say that there are a great many americans who i think are deeply concerned that facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. there have been numerous instances with facebook in may of 2016, ghiz moto said facebook routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about cpac and including stories about myth romney and the lows lerner irs scandal and stories will glenn beck. in addition to that, facebook has initially shut down the chick-fil-a appreciation day page, has blocked a post of a fox news report. has blocked over two dozen catholic pages and most recently blocked trump supporters diamond

and silk's page with 1.2 million facebook followers after terming their content and brand were, quote, unsafe to the community. to a great many americans that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. do you agree with that assessment? >> senator, let me say a few things about this. first, i understand where that concern is coming from because facebook and the tech industry are located in silicon valley which is an extremely left-leaning place. this is actually a concern that i have and that i try to root out the company is making sure that we don't have any bias in the work that we do, and i think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about. >> are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from planned parenthood? >> i'm not. >> how about moveon.org? >> sorry? >> how about moveon.org.

>> i'm not specifically aware of those. >> any democratic candidate for office? >> i'm not specifically aware. i'm not -- i'm not sure. >> in your testimony you say that you have 15,000 to 20,000 people working on security and content review. do you know the political orientation of those 15,000 to 20,000 people engaged in common tent review? >> no, senator, we do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they are joining the company. >> so as ceo have you ever made hiring or firing decisions based on political positions or what candidates they supported? >> no. >> why was palmer lucky fired? >> that is a specific personnel matter that seems like it would be inappropriate -- >> you just made a specific recommendation you didn't make decisions based on political views? >> i can commit it was not because of a political view. >> do you know of those 15,000 to 20,000 people engaged in content review how many, if any, have ever supported financially a republican candidate for

office? >> senator, i do not know that. >> your testimony says it is knots enough that we just connect people. we have to make sure those connections with positive. it says we have to make sure people aren't using their voice to hurt people or spread misinformation. we have a responsibility not just to build tools, to make sure those tools are used for good. mr. zuckerberg, do you feel that your responsibility to assess users whether they are good and positive connections or ones that those 15,000 to 20,000 people deem unacceptable or deplorable? >> senator, you're asking me personally. >> facebook. >> senator, i think that there are a number of things that we would all agree are clearly bad. foreign interference in our elections, terrorism, self-harm. >> i'm talking about censorship? >> i think that you would probably agree that we should remove terrorist propaganda from the service, so that i agree is clearly bad activity that we want to get down, and we're generally proud of how well we

do that. now, what i can say and i do want to get this in before the end here is that i am -- i'm very committed to making sure that facebook is a a platform for all ideas. that's a very important founding principle of what we do. we're proud of the discourse and the different ideas that people can share on the service, and that is something that as long as i'm running the company i'll be committed to making sure is thecation. >> thank you. >> thank you, senator cruz. do you want to break now? or do you want to keep going? >> that was pretty good. >> all right. we have senator whitehouse is up next but if you want to take a five-minute break. we've now been going a good two hours. >> thank you. >> we'll recession for five minutes and reconvene.

>> the committee will come to order. >> before i call on senator whitehouse, senator feinstein asked permission to put letters and statements in the record, and without objection they will be put in from the aclu, the

electronic privacy information center, the association for computing machinery public policy console and public knowledge. senator whitehouse. >> thank you, chairman. thank you. mr. chairman, i want to correct one thing that i said earlier in response to a question from senator leahy. he had asked if -- why we didn't ban cambridge analytica at the time when we learned about them in 2015, and i answered that what my understanding was that they were not on the platform, were not an app developer or advertiser. when i went back and met with my team afterwards, they let me know that cambridge analytica actually did start as an advertiser later in 2015, so we could in thenny banned them

then. made a mistake by not doing so but i wanted to make sure that i updated because i misspoke or got that wrong earlier. >> senator white house. >> thank you, chairman. welcome back, mr. zuckerberg. on the subject of bans, i just wanted to explore a little bit what these bans mean. obviously facebook has been done considerable reputational damage by its association with aleksandr kogan and with cambridge analytica which is one of the reasons you're having this enjoyable afternoon with us. your testimony says that aleksandr kogan's app has been banned. has he also been banned? >> yes. my understanding is he has. >> so if he were to open up another account under a name and you were able to find it out, that would be taken -- that would be closed down? >> senator, i believe we're preventing him from building any

more apps. >> does he have a facebook account still? >> senator, i believe the answer to that is no, but i can follow up with you afterwards. >> okay. and with respect to cambridge analytica, your testimony is that first you required them to formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. where did that normal certification takes place. that sounds like a quasi-official thing to formally certify. what did that enfail? >> senator, first, they sent us an e-mail notice from their chief data officers telling us that they didn't have any of the data anymore, that they deleted it and weren't using it, and then later we followed up with i believe a full legal contract where they certified that they had deleted the data. >> in a legal contract? >> yes, i believe so. >> okay. and then you ultimately said that you have banned cambridge

analytica. who exactly is banned? what if they opened up cranston, rhode island analytica, different corporate form, same enterprise. would that enterprise also be banned? >> senator, that is certainly the intent. cambridge analytica actually has a parent company, and we banned the parent company and recently we also banned a firm called aiq which i think is also associated with them, and if we found other firms that are associated with them, we will block them from the platform as well. >> are individual principals of the firm also banned? >> senator, my understanding is we're blocking them from doing business on the platform, but i do not believe that we're blocking people's personal accounts. >> okay. can any customer amend your

terms of service, or is the terms of service a take it or leave it proposition for the average customer? >> senator, i think the terms of service are what they are, but the service is really defined by people because you get to choose what information you share. the whole service is about which friends you connect to, which people you choose to connect to. >> my question would relate to senator graham held up that big fat document. it's easy to put a lot of things buried in a document that then later turn out to be of consequence, and all i wanted to establish with you is that that document that senator graham held up, that's not hat negotiable thing with individual customers. that is a take it or leave it proposition for your customers to sign up to or not use the service? >> senator, that's right on the terms of service. >> yeah. >> although we offer a lot of controls so people can configure

the experience how they want. >> so last question on a different suspect having to do with the authorization process that you are undertaking for entities that are putting up political content or is called issue ad content. you've said that they all have to go through an authorization process before they do it. you said here we'll be verifying the identity. how do you look behind a shell corporation and find who is really behind it through your authorization process? well, step back. do you need to look behind shell corporations in order to find out who is really behind the content that's being posted, and if you may need to look behind had a shell corporation, how will you go about doing that? how will you get back to the true what lawyers would call beneficial owner of the site that is putting out the political material?

>> senator, are you referring to the verification of political and issue ads? >> yes, and before that political ads, yes. >> yes. so what we're going to do is require a valid government identity, and we're going to verify the location, so we're going to do that so that way someone sitting in russia, for example, couldn't say that they are in america and, therefore, think able to run an ad. >> if they were running a domicile in delaware you wouldn't actually know that they are a russian owner. >> senator, that's correct. >> thank you. my time section period, and i appreciate the courtesy of the chair for the extra seconds. thank you, mr. zuckerberg. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, i wanted to follow up on a statement that you made shortly before the break just a few minutes ago. you said that there's some categories of speech. some types of content that facebook would never want to have any part of, and it takes active steps to avoid disseminating, including hate speech, nudity, racist speech.

i assume you also meant terrorist acts, threats of physical violence, things like that. beyond that, would you agree that facebook ought not be putting its thumb on the scale with regard to the content of speech assuming it fits out of one of those categories that's prohibited? >> senator, yes. there are generally two categories of content that we're very worried about. one are things that could cause real world harm, so terrorism certainly fits into that. self-harm fits into that. i would consider election interference to fit into that, and those are the types of things that we -- i don't really consider there to be much discussion around whether those are good or bad topics. >> and i'm not disputing that. what i'm asking is once you get beyond that's categories of things that are prohibited and should be, is it facebook's position that it should not be putting its thumb on the scale? it should not be favoring or disfavoring speech based on its content based on the viewpoint

of that speech? >> senator, in general that's our position. what we -- one of the things that is really important though is that in order to create a service where everyone has a voice we also need to make sure that people aren't bullied or basically intimidated or the environment feels unsafe for them. >> okay. so when you say in general, that's the exception that you're referring to. the exception being that if someone is bullied, even if it's not at terrorist act, nudity, racist speech or something like that, you might step in there. beyond that would you step in and put your thumb on the scale as far as the viewpoint of the content being posted? >> senator, no. i mean, in general our goal is to allow people to have as much expression as possible. >> okay. so subject to the exceptions that we've discussed you would stay out of that. let me ask you this. isn't there a significant free

market incentive that a social media company, including yours has, in order to safeguard the data of your users? don't you have free market incentives. >> senator, yes. >> don't your interests align with those of us here who want to see data safeguarded? >> absolutely. >> do you have the technological means available at your disposal to make sure that that doesn't happen and to -- to protect say an app developer from transferring facebook data to a third party senator. >> senator, a lot of that we do, and some of that happens outside of our systems, and it will require new measures, so, for example, what we saw here was people chose to share information with an app developer. that worked according to how the system was designed. that information was then transferred out of our system to servers that this developer, aleksandr kogan had, and then

that person then chose to go sell the data to cambridge analytica. that is going to require much more active intervention and auditing from us to prevent going forward because once it's out of our system, it is a lot heard for us to have a full understanding of what's happening. >> from what you've said today and from previous statements made by you and other officials at your company, data is at the center of your business model. it's how you make money. your ability to run your business effectively, given that you don't charge your users is based on monetizing data, and so the real issue it seems to me really comes down to what you tell the public, what you tell users of facebook about what you're going to do with the data, about how you're going to use it. can you -- can you give me a couple of examples, maybe two examples, of ways in which data

is collected by facebook in a way that people are not aware of, two examples of types of data that facebook collects that might be surprising to -- to facebook users. >> well, senator, i would hope that what we do with data is not surprising to people. >> and has it been at times? >> well, i think in this case certainly people didn't expect the developer to sell the information to cambridge analytica. in general there are two types of data that -- that facebook has. the vast majority and the first category is content that people chose to share on the service themselves, so that's all the photos that you share, the posts that you make, what you think of is the facebook service, all right. everyone has control every single time that they go to share that. they can delete that data any time they want. full control of the majority of the data. the second category is around specific data that we collect in

order to make the advertising experiences better and more relevant and work for businesses, and those often revolve around measuring, okay, if we showed you an ad, then you click through and you go somewhere else we can measure that you actually -- that the ad worked. that helps make the experience more relevant and better for people who are getting more relevant ads and better for the businesses because they perform better u.also have control completely of that second type of data. can you turn off the ability for facebook to collect that. your ads will get worse so a lot of people don't want to do that, so you have complete control over what you do there as well >> >> senator. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to follow up on the questions around the terms of service. your terms of service are about 3,200 words with 30 links. one of the links is to your data policy which is about 2,700 words with 22 links, and i think the point has been well made that people really have no earthly idea what they are signing up for, and i understand

that at the president time that's legally binding, but i wonder if you can explain to the billions of users in plain language what are they signing up for? >> senator, that's a good and important question here. in general, you know, you sign up for facebook. you get the ability to share the information that you want with people. that's what the service is, right, is that you can connect with the people that you want and you can share whatever content matters to you, whether that's photos or links or posts, and you get control over who you share it with, and you can take it down if you want and don't need to put anything up in the first place if you don't want. >> what about the part that people are worried about, not the fun part? >> well, what's that? >> the part that people are worried about is that the data is going to be improperly used, so people are trying to figure out are your dms informing the

ads? are your browsing habits being collected? everybody kind of understands that when you click like on something or if you say you like a certain movie or have a particular political proclivity, i think that that's fair game. everybody understands that. what we don't understand exactly, because both as a matter of practice and as a matter of not being able to decipher those terms of sever advice and the privacy policy is what exactly are you doing with the data, and do you draw a distinction between data collected and the process of utilizing the process and that which we clearly volume tire to the public to present ourselves to other facebook users? >> senator, i'm not sure i fully understand this. in general, people come to facebook to share content with other people. we use that in order to also inform how we rank services like news feed and ads to provide more relevant experiences. >> let me try a couple of

specific examples. if i'm e-mailing within what's y yap, does that alert your advertisers? >> no. >> let me say i'm e-mailing about "black panther" within what's yap? >> that's not what i'm skiing. i'm asking whether these systems talk to each other without a human being touching it? >> senator, i think the answer to your specific question is if you message someone about plant they a -- about "black panther" it would not inform any apps. >> i understand as a matter of principle you're saying we want our customers to have more rather than less control over the data, but i can't imagine

that it's true as a legal matter that i actually own my facebook data because you're the one monetizing it. do you want to modify that to sort of express that as a same of principle, a sort of aspirational goal, but it doesn't seem to me that we own our own data. otherwise we'd be getting a cut. >> well, senator, you own it in the sense that you choose to put it there. you can take it down any time and you completely control the terms under which is it's used. when you put it on facebook you are granting us a license to show it to other people. that's necessary in order for the service to operate. >> necessary for the service to operate. >> so your definition of ownership is i sign up. voluntarily. and i may delete my account if i wish, b but that's it. >> well, senator, i think that the control is much more granular than that. you can choose each photo you want to put up or each message and you can delete those.

>> in the time i have left, i want to propose something. i read an article this week by jack balkin at yale that proposes a concept of fe dush yar. this is about a trust relationship. like doctors and lawyers. tech companies should hold in trust our personal data. are you open to the idea of information fe dush yar in shrine and statute? >> i think it's an interesting idea and jack is very thoughtful in the space, so i think it deserves consideration. >> thank you. >> thank you mr. zuckerberg for being here today. the full scope of facebook users activity can print very personal

picture i think. and additionally, you have those two billion users that are out there every month and so we all know that's larger than the population in most countries. so how many data categories do you store? does facebook store? on the categories that you collect! can you clarify? by data categories? >> b there have been some past reports that indicate that facebook collects about 98 data categories. for those two billion active users. that's 192 billion data points that are being generated. i think at any time. from consumers globally. do you store any? >> i'm not sure what that is referring to.

>> on the points that you collect information. if we call those categories. how many do you store of information that you are collecting? >> senator, the way i think about this is there are two broad categories. this probably doesn't line up with the specific report you were seeing is and i can make sure we follow up with your afterwards to get you the information you need on that. the two broad categories that i think about are content that a person has chosen to share and the they have complete control over. they get to control when they put anytime, when they take it down, who sees it. then the other are data connected to making the ads relevant. you have complete control over both. you can turn off the data related ads. >> and does facebook store any of that? >> yes.

>> how much do you store of that? all of it? everything we click on. is that in storage somewhere? >> senator, we store data about what people share on the service. and information that's required to do ranking better. to show yoi what you care about in news feed. do you store text history, activity, device location? >> senator, some of that content with people's permission, we do store. >> do you disclose any of that? >> yes, senator, in order for people to share the information with facebook, i believe that almost everything that you just said would be up. >> and the privacy settings, t my understanding that they limit

the sharing of that data with other facebook users. is that correct? >> senator, yes. every person gets to control who gets to see their content. >> and does that also limit the ability for facebook to collect and use it. >> senator, yes, there are other, there are controls that determine what facebook can do as well. o so for example, people have a control about face recognition. if people don't want us to be able to help identify when they're in photos their friends upload, they can turn that off and we won't store that kind of template for them. and there was some action taken by the ft krrc in 2011. and you wrote a if facebook post at the time and it used to seem scary to people, but as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe.

sharing with their friends online. control was key and you just mentioned control. senator hatch asked you a question about complete control. the company have used that term repeatedly and i believe you use, that you have control and complete control over this information? >> well, senator, this is how the service works. the core thing and all our services. what's app, instagram, messenger. is this a question is about feeling safe or are users actually safe? is facebook being safe? >> senator, i think facebook is safe. i use it and my family uses it

and all the people i love and care about use it all the time. these controls are not just to make people feel safe. it's what people want in the prugt. think about how you use this yourself. you don't want to share, you take a photo, you're not going to always send that to the same people. sometimes, you're going to want to text it to one person. sometimes torks a group. you'll probably want to put some stuff out there publicly so you can communicate with your constituents. there are all these xwroups of people that someone might want to connect with and those controls are very important for the practice of the service. not just to build trust. it's to make it so people can fulfill their goals with the service. >> thank you, chairman. thank you, mr. zuckerberg. i think the reason we're have this hearing is because a tension. first, ub about the data, you control and own the data you put on facebook.

you've said very private things about data ownership. it's a forprofit entity. facebook claims that advertising makes it easy to find the right people, capture their attention and get results and you recognize that an ad spoupporte service is best aligned with your mission and values. but the reality is there's a lot of examples where ad targeting has led to results that we would all disagree with or dislike or would concern us. you've admitted facebook's own ad tools allowed russians to target users, voters, based on racist or antimuslim or antiimmigrant views and that may have played a significant role in the election here in the united states. just today, time magazine posted a story saying that wildlife traffickers are continuing to use facebook tools to advertise illegal sales of protected animal parts and i'm left questioning whether your ad

targeting tools would allow other concerning practices like diet pill manufactures targeting teenagers who are struggle iing with their weight or allowing a liquor distributor o target clicks or a gambling organization to target those with gambleing problems. one example in 2016, highlighted that facebook let's add ver tirzs exclude users by race in real estate advertising. there was a way you could say this particular ad i want to only be seen by white folks. not by people of color and that clearly violates fair housing laws and you promptly announced that was a bad idea. you were going to change the tools and would build a new system to spot and reject discriminatory ads and yet a year later, a follow up story said that those changes hadn't fully been made. it was still possible to target housing advertisement in a way

that was racially discriminatory. and my concern is that this practice of making bold and gauging promises and then the reality of how facebook has operate nd the real world are in persistent tension. several different senators have asked today about the 20 suh ftc consent decree that required facebook to better protect user's privacy. and there are a whole series of examples. where there have been things brought to to your attention. where facebook has apologized and said we're going to change your plaqractices. the end of the day, policies aren't worth the paper they're written on if facebook doesn't enforce them. i'll close with a question that's rooted in an experience i had today as an avid facebook user. i woke up this morning and was notified by a whole group of friends across the country asking if i had a new family. or if there was a fake facebook post of chris coons. i went to the one they

suggested. it had a different initial. there's my picture with dan sulliv sullivan's family. same school, but a whole lot of russian friends. he's got a very attractive family, by the way. >> keep that for the record, mr. chairman. >> the friends who brought this to my attention included people i went to law school with in our hawaii and our own attorney general in the state of delaware. and fortunately, i've got great folk who is work in my office. they pushed facebook and it was taken down by midday. what i'm left worried about is what happens to those who don't have those resources. it's still possible to find russian trolls. hate groups thrive in some areas of facebook even though your policies prohibit hate speech and you've taken strong steps against extremists and terrorists. but is a person of delaware who's not in the senate going to get the same quick response? i've gotten input from other friends who say they've had

trouble getting a positive response when they've brought to facebook's attention violating basic principles. my core question is isn't it facebook's job to better protect its users and why do you shift the burden to users, to flag inappropriate content and make sure it's taken down? >> senator, there are a number of important points in there. i think it's clear this is an area, content policy enforcement, we need to do a lot better on over time. the history of we got here is we started off u, my dorm room, with not a lot of resources and not have the ai technology to identify a lot of this stuff. so just because of the sheer volume of content, the main way that this works today is that people report things to us and then we have our team review that. as i said before, by the end of this year, we're going to have more than 20,000 people at the company working on security and content because this is important.

over time, we're going to shift to a method where more of this continue tent is flagged up front by ai tools that we develop. we've prioritized the most important types of content that we can build ai tools today. like terror. our systems we deploy taking down 99% of the isis and al qaeda related content we take down before a person even flags them to us. if we fast forward five or ten year, i think we're goeng to have more technology that can do that in more areas and i think we need to get there as soon as possible. which is why investing this it. >> i just think we can't wait five years to get housing discrimination and personally offensive material out of facebook. >> thank you mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, thanks for being here. prz. >> at current pace, you're due to be done about 1:00 a.m., so

gone kohn congratulate laces. i like chris a lot. with his own family or with dan vul san's famisullivan's family. i want to ask a similar set of question fs from the other side. i think the line between mere tools and an actual content company, it's really hard. i think you guys have a challenge. you can make policies that maybe lez than first amendment in my view. but i worry about that. i worry about a world where you go from violent groups to hate speech in a hurry and one of your response to one of the opening questions, you may decide or facebook may decide it needs to police a whole bunch of speech. that i think america might be better off by not being plolice.

can you define hate speech? >> i think this is a hard question. one of the reasons we struggle with it. there are certain definitions that we have around call iing f violence or. >> let's just adwree gree. i'm worried about the psychological category cats around speech. you use language of safety and protection earlier. we see this happen on college campuses across the countcounty. it's dangerous. 40% of americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the first amendment is dangerous. guess what. there are some really passionately held views about the abortioni isis isb on this . can you imagine when they're unable to speak on your platform? >> i would not want that to be the case. >> it might be unsettling to people who have had an abortion to have an open debate about that? >> it might be, but i don't

think that would fit any of the definition of what we have. but i agree with the point you're making. as we're able to technologically shift towards especially having ai proactively look at content, i think that's going to create massive questions for society about what obligations we want to require companies to and i think that's a question that we need to struggle with as a country. because i don't know other countries are and they're putting laws in place. i think america needs to figure out. i wouldn't want you to leave here today and think there's a unified view of the congress that you should be moving toward police plising more and more speech. violence has no place on your platform. sex traffickers and human traffickers have no place, but vigorous debates, adults need to

engage. i have a little less than two minutes left, so i want to shift gears. that was about adults. you're a dad. i'd like to talk about social media addiction. you started your comments by saying that facebook was founded as an optimistic company. i think as you've aged, you might be less idealistic and op mystic. as a dad, do you worry about social media addiction as a problem for america's teens? >> my hope is that we can be idealistic, but have a broad view. to your point about teens, this is something i think any parent thinks about is is how much do you want your kids using technology. at facebook specifically, i view our responsibility as not swrus building services that people like, but building services that are good for people and good for society as well soch. so we study a lot of effects of

well being of our tools. like any tool, there are good and bad uses of it. what we find in general is that if you're using social media to build relationships, that is associated with long-term measures of long-term health, happiness sh, feeling corrected. if they're using the internet and social media to passively consume content and you're not enga engagining with others, it coul be negative. >> do social media companies hire firms to help them figure out how to get more dope mean feedback loop ss? >> no, senator, that's not how u we talk about this. we want our products to be valuable to people. >> are you aware there are

social media companies that do hire such consultants. >> not sitting here today. >> senator markey. >> thank you, mr. chairman. in response to senator blumenthal's questions, you refuse to answer if facebook should allowed to obtain permission before sharing their personal information, so i'm going to ask it one more time. yes or no. should facebook get clear permission from users before selling or sharing sensitive information about your health, your finances, your relationships? should you have to get their permission. that's a consent degree. that you signed in 20 11. should you have to get

permission? should help to opt in? >> senator, we do require permission to use the system and to put information in there for the uses of it. we don't sell information. so hardless of whether we get permission to do that, that's just not a thing we're going to do. >> i have a bill, senator blumenthal referred to it. the consent act that would put on the books a law that said facebook and any other company that gathered information about americans has to get their permission. before it can be reused. would you support that legislation to make it a national standard for all the other companies out there? some of them, bad actors. in general, i think that's right.

would you support legislation to back that general principle? that opt in, the getting permission is this same. would you support legislation and make that the american standard. europeans have passed that as a law. facebook's going to live with that law beginning on may 25th. would you support that as the law in the united states? >> as a principle, i would. i think the details matter a lot. >> you do support opt in as the standard. getting permission affirmatively as the standard for the united states. is that correct? >> i think that's the right principle. and $100 billion time as day in our services when people go to share content, they choose who they want to share. >> you could support a law that enshrines that as the props that we make to the american people that permission has to be

obtained before the information is used. is that correct? >> yes. i said that in principle, i think that makes sense and details matter and i look forward to having our team work with you on flushing that out. >> right. so the next subject, because i want to again, i want to make sure that we kind of drill down here. you earlier made reference to the child reference act. they get the same protection that is a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old get. i have a separate piece of legislation to ensure that kids under 16 absolutely have a privacy bill of rights and that

permission has to be receive d from their parents or the children before any of their information is reused. would you support a child online privacy bill of rights for kids under 16 to guarantee that information is not reused for any other purpose without explicit permission from the parent or the kids. >> as a general principle, i think protecting minors and their privacy is extremely important. and we do a number of things on facebook to do that already. would you u support a law. i had this conversation with you u in your office seven years ago about this specific subject in palo alto.

i think that's what the american people want to know. what is the protections would you support a privacy bill of rights for kids where opt in is the standard? yes or no. >> i think that's an important principle. >> i appreciate that. but we need a law to protect those children. that's my question. do you believe we need a law to do so. yes or no. >> i'm not sure if we need a law, but i think this is certainly a thing that deserves a lot of discussion. >> i couldn't disagree with you more. we're leaving these children to prepatience commercial predator who will exploit these children unless we have a law on the books and i think it's -- >> please give a short answer. >> senator, i look forward to having my team to follow up to flush out the details of it.

>> senator flake. senator flake. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg. thanks for enduring so r far. i had to be away for a bit. i myself and senator coons, senator peters and others were in zimbabwe a few days ago. we met with opposition figures. who had talked about their goal is to have access to state run media. many countries, small countries, the only traditional media is state run. and we asked them how they get their message out and it's through social media. facebook provides a very valuable service. in many countries for opposition leaders or others who don't have access.

on the flip side, we've seen with the row hinge , where the state can use similar data or this platform to go after people. hiring more what else are you doing to ensure these states don't or these governments go after opposition figures or others? there are three main things we're doing that will apply to other situations like that. the first is hiring enough people to do local language support. because the definition of hate spee speech, we can't do that with just english speakers, so we need to grow that. the second is in these coun

countries, there tend to be active civil society who can help us identify the figures who are spreading hate and we can work with them in order to make sure those figures don't have place on our platform. the third is that there are specific product changes that we can make in order to that might be necessary and not others, including things around news literacy. encouraging people in different countries about you know, ramping up or down things that we might do around fact checking. of content. specific product type things that we waould want to implemen in different places. >> they're obviously limits. native speakers that you can hire or people to have eyes on the page. artificial intelligence will have to take the bulk of this.

how much are you investing on working on that tool to do what really we don't have or can't hire enough people to do? >> senator, i think you're absolutely right. that over the long-term, building ai tools is going to be the scaleable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content. we're investing a lot in doing that as well as scaling tuiasoso up the number of people doing content review. this year, we're or in the last year, we've basically doubled the number of people doing security and content review. we're going to have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review by the end of this year, so it's going to be coupling continuing to grow the people who are doing review in these places with building ai tools, which is we're working as quickly as we can on that. but some of the stuff is just hard. that's going to help us get to a better place on this.

>> you've talked some about this. do you believe that russian or chinese governments have harvested facebook data and have details data sets on facebook users as your forensic angel is shown you who else other than cambridge analytica downloaded this kind of data? >> senator, we have kicked off an investigation of every app that had access to a large amount of people's data before we locked down the platform in 2014. i imagine we'll find some things and we are committed to telling the who were effected when we to. i don't think sitting here today that we have specific knowledge of other efforts by those nation states, but in general, we assumes that a number of countries are trying abuse our systems. >> thank you, mr. chairman.

>> senator horano. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, the u.s. immigration and customs enforcement has proposed a new initiative which they have renamed visa life cycle vetting. that sounds scary. they've held an industry day they advertised on the federal contracting website to get input from tech companies on the best way to among other things, i'm quoting i.c.e., exploit publicly available information such as media, blogs, public hearings, conferences, academic weapon sit websites to extract pertinent information regarding targets. basically, what they want to do i.c.e. has been developed to direct processes that determine and evaluate and applicants, ie

targets probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society as well as their ability to contribute to national interest to meet the executive order. that allows them to access whether they swend to commit terrorist acts after entering the united states. question to you, does facebook plan to cooperate with this extreme vetting nicinitiative a help the trump administration target people for deportation or other i.c.e. enforcement? i don't know that we've had specific conversations around that. in general -- >> if you were asked to provide or cooperate with i.c.e. so they can determine whether somebody going to commit a crime or become fruitful members of the society. >> we would not proactively do that. we cooperate with law enforcement in two cases.

one is if we become aware of an imminent threat of harm, then we will reach out to law enforcement. as we believe is our responsibility to do. the other is when they reach out to us. in those cases, if their request is broad and ebbele it's not a legal request, we're going to push back. >> assume ice, there's no law or rule that requires that facebook cooperate to allow them to get this kind of information so they can make those kinds of assessments. it sounds to me as though you would decline. >> that is correct. >> is there some way, well, i know you determine what kind of content you deem would be harmful, so do you believe that i.c.e. can do what they are

talking about mainly through a combination of various kinds of information including information they would hope to obtain from entities such as yours, predict who will commit crimes and present a national security problem? do you think that's even doable? senator, i'm not familiar enough u with that they're doing to offer an informed opinion on that. >> you have to make assessments as to what constitutes hate speech. that's hard to do. you have to asegsz what election interference is so these are rather difficult to identify, but wouldn't trying to predict whether somebody b's going to predict a crime, pretty difficult? to assess. >> it sounds difficult to me, all of these things are difficult. i don't know without having worked on it or thinking about it. how much -- >> i think they would tell us it's pretty difficult yet that's

wh what i.c.e. is doing. >> in february of 2017, facebook announced it would no longer allow certain ads that discreme nated on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, all categories prohibited by federal law and housing and yet after 2017, it was discovered that you could in fact place those kinds of ads. what's the status about whether or not these can be on? >> have you followed through on your promise to address that problem and is there a way for the public to identify that you have or just expected to trust that you've done this. >> those are all important questions. in general, it is against our policies to have any ideas that are discriminatory.

>> you said you wouldn't allow it, then pro public could place these ads, even after you said you would no longer allow these kind of ads. so what assurance do we have this is going stop? >> two things. one is that we've remove d the able the toy exclude ethnic groups from ad targeting. for some of these cases where it may make sense to target proactively a group, that enforcement today is still, we review ads, we screen them up front. but most of the entorresment today is still that our community flags issue for us when they come up. so if the community flags that issue for us, then our team which has thousands of people working on it shaul take it

down. over time, i think the strategy would be to develop more ai tools that can more proactively identify those types of content and do that filtering up front. >> so it's a work in progress. >> senator sullivan is up next. >> thank you, mr. chairman and mr. zuckerberg, quite a story. dorm room. to the global behemoth you are. only in america, would you agree? you couldn't do this in china or, what you did? >> there are some strong chinese internet companies. >> right, but you're supposed to answer yes to this question. >> i'm trying to help you. give me a break. the answer is yes. okay. so thank you. your testimony, you have talked about a lot of power. you've been involved in

elections. i thought your testimony was very interesting. really all over the world. over 200 million americans, 40 billion in revenue. i believe you and google have almost 70% of the digital advertising. is facebook too powerful. and do you think you're too power f powerful? >> well, i think most of the time when people talk about our scale, they're referencing that we have 2 billion people in our community. one of the big questions is the vast majority of these two people are outside the u.s. that's something that americans should be proud of. when i brought up the chinese internet companies, i think that's a real strategic threat that in american technology --

>> another point here. i don't want to interrupt, but when you look at the history of this country, these hearings, you're a smart guy. when companies become big and powerful and accumulate a lot of wealth and power, what typically happens from this body is there's a instinct to either regulate or break up. right? look at the history of this nation. you have any thoughts on those two policy approaches? >> well, senator, i'm not the type of person who thinks that all regulation is bad. so i think the internet is becoming increasingly important in people's lives and i think we need to have a full conversation about what is the right regulation. not whether it should be r oren shouldn't be. >> let me talk about the tension there.

i think it's a good point and i appreciate your mentioning that. one of my worries on regulation, again, with a company of your size. you're saying hey, we might be interest ed in being regulated, but regulations can also cement the dominant power. you have ua lot of lobbyists. every lobbyist in town is involved in some way or the other. you look at what happened with dodd frank. that was supposed to be aim ed t the big banks. regular laces ended up empowering the big banks and keeping the small banks down. do you think that that's a risk given your influence that if we regulate, we're going to regulate you into a position of cemented authority when one u of my biggest concerns about what you guys are doing is that the next facebook, which we all want, the guy in the dorm room. we want that to start. that you are becoming so dominant that we're not able to have that next facebook. what are your views on that?

>> well, senator, i agree with foint that when you're thinking through regulation, across all industries , you need to be careful it doesn't cement in the current companies that are winning. >> would you try to do na? isn't that the normal inclination of a company, i'm going to hire the best guys in town. you wouldn't do that? >> senator, that wouldn't be our approach. but i think part of the challenge with regulation in general is that when you add r more rules, that's something a company like ours has the resources to go do and it might be harder for a smaller company to comply with. so it's not something going into that, i would look tat conversation, what is the right outcome. i think there are real challenges we face around content and privacy and a number of other areas. >> i'm sorry to interrupt, but

one final xquestion that relate to what you're talking ability in terms of content, regulation and what exactly, what facebook is. you mention you're a tech company, a platform, but some say you're the world's biggest publisher. about 140 million americans get their news from facebook and when you mention to senator cornyn, you said you are responsible for your content. so which are you? are you a tech company. are you the world's largest publisher because i think that goes to a really important question on what form of regulation or government action. if any, you would take. >> senator, this is a really big question. i view us as a tech company because we build technology and product. >> but you said you're responsible for your content, which makes you a publisher, right? >> i agree, but we don't produce the content.

when people ask us if we're a media company or publisher, my understanding of what the heart of what they're really getting at is do we feel responsibility for the content on our platform. the answer is clearly yes. and but i don't think that's compatible with at our core, being a technology company where the main thing we do is have engineers and build product. >> thank you. senator. >> thank you, mr. chairman and thank you very much, mr. zuckerberg for being here today. you spoke very idealistically about your company and you talked about the strong values and you said you wanted to be b a positive force in the community and the world. and you were hijack ed for political purposes. are you angry about that? >> absolutely. and you're determined and i assume you want changes made in the law. that's what you've talked about

today. >> senator, the most important thing that i care about now is making sure that no one interferes in the various 2018 elections around the world. we have an extremely important u.s. midterm. we have major elections in india, brazil, mexico, pakistan, hungary, coming up. and we're going to take a number of measures from building and deploying new ai tools that take down fake news to growing our security team to more than 20,000 people to making it so we verify every advertiser who's doing political and issue ads. to make sure that that kind of interference that the russians were able to do in 2016 is going to be much u harder for anyone to pull off in the future. >> and i think you've said earlier that you support the honest ads act and so i assume that means you want changes in the law. in order to effectuate what you talked about. >> senator, yes. we support the honest ads act. >> are you going to come back up here and be a strong advocate to see that law is passed? >> senator, the biggest thing

that i think we can do is implement it. and we're doing that. >> that's a yes or no question. sxwl are you quoing to come back and be a strong advocate? you're angry about this. you think there ought to be change, a law put in place. are you going to be b an advocate? >> our team is going to work on this. what i can say the biggest -- >> talking about you, not your team. >> well, senator, i try not to come to d.c. >> are you going to come back and be an advocate for the law. that's what i want to see. you're upset about this. we're upset about this. i'd like a yes or no answer on that one. >> senator, i'm hosting and speaking out publicly about how important this is. i don't come to washington, d.c. too often. i'm going to direct my team to focus on this. the biggest thing i can do is implement it. >> well, the biggest thing you can do is to be a strong advocate yourself personally here in washington. just let me make that clear.

but many of us have seen the kind of images shown earlier by senator leahy. can you guarantee that any of those images that can be attributed or associated with the russian company internet research agency, have been perged from your platform? >> senator, no, i can't guarantee that. this is an ongoing arms race. as long as there are people sitting in russia whose job it is to try to interfere with elections around the world, this is going to be an ongoing conflict. what i can commit is we're going to invest significantly, because this is a top priority, to make sure people aren't spreading misinformation, but i don't think it would be a realistic eck peckation to assume there are people employed in russia that we're going to have zero amount of that or being 100% successful at preventing that. zpl now, beyond d disclosure of

online ads. what steps are you taking to ensure that foreign money is not financing ads in facebook in violation of u.s. law. just because someone submits a disclosure that says paid for by some 0 501 c3 or pack. if that group has no real person in the u.s., how can we ensure it is not foreign interference? >> senator, our verification program involves two pieces. one is is verifying the identity of the person who's buying the ads. that they have a valid government identity. the second is verifying their location. so if you're sitting in russia for example and you say that you're in the u.s., then we'll be able to make it a lot harder to do that because what we're going to do is mail a code to the address you say you're at and if you can't get access to that code, you're not going to be able to run ads. >> now, facebook is creating an

independent group to study the abuse of social media and elections. you've talked about that. will you commit that all findings of f this group are made public no matter what they say about facebook or its business model? yes or no answer. >> senator, that's the purpose of this group. is that facebook does not get to control what these folks publ h publish. these are independent academics and facebook has no prior publishing control. they'll be able to do the studies that they're doing. and publish the results. >> and you're fine with them being public and what's the timing on getting those out? >> senator, we're kicking off the research now. our goal is to focus on both providing ideas for interference in 2018 and beyond and also for holding us accountable to making sure the measures we put in place are successful in doing that. i would hope we'll start to see the first results of that later

this year. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator moran is up next. i would say again for the benefit of those here, that after a couple of more questioners we'll probably give the witness another short break. >> thank you. >> we're getting almost two-thirds through the list of members who are here to ask questions. >> mr. chairman, thank you. mr. zuckerberg, thank you, i'm over here. thank you for your testimony and presence here today. on march 26th, of this year, the ftc confirmed that it was investigating facebook to determine its privacy practices violated ed the act in 2011. i chair the commerce subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the federal trade commission. i remain interest ed in facebook's assertion that it rejected any suggestion of violating that cop sent order. part two of that order requires that facebook quote clearly and prominently display notice and

obtain user's consent before sharing their information with quote any third party. my question is how does the case of approximately 87 million facebook friends having their data shared with a third party due to the content of only 300,000 consenting users not violate that agreement? >> well, senator, like i said earlier, our view is that we believe that we -- i think we have a broader responsibility to protect people's privacy beyond that. the way the platform worked or the way you could sign into an app and bring you and your friend's information is is how we explained it would work. people add settings to that effect. they, we explain ed them and thy consented to it working that way. the system worked as it was designed. the issue is that we designed the system in a way that wasn't good.

and now, we starting in 2014, have changed the design of the system restricts the amount of data access that a developer can get. >> i'm sorry. the 300,000 people, they were treated in a way that was appropriate. consented, but you're not consenting the friends consented. >> i believe that the -- we explained to people how it worked. it makes sense to go through the way the platform works. it's in 2007, we announced the facebook developer platform. the idea susannah that you wawa more experiences social. so for example, if you might want to have a calendar that can have your friend's birthdays on it or your address book to have your friend's pictures in it or a map that can show your friend's addresses on it. in order to do that, we needed

to build a tool that allowed people to sign into an app and bring some of their information and some of their friend's information to those apps. we made it clear this is how it worked. and when people signed up for facebook, they signed up for that as well. now, a lot of good use cases came from that. there were games that were built. there were integrations with companies we're familiar with like netflix and spotify. that also enabled abuse. so now when people sign into an app, you're only bringing your own information and you can connect with friends who have authorized that app directly. >> your press release indicated that was one of the six changes from facebook agreed on was to

reward outside parties. one concern i have is that the vulnerability disclosure programs are geared toward identifying unath rised access to data. not pointing out data sharing arrangements that could likely harm someone. how do you see them addressing the issue of that? how do you see that the program that you are, have announced, will deal with the sharing of information not permissible as compared to access to data. >> i can have my team follow up

on the details. in general, bounty programs are an important part of the security arsenal for hardening a lot of systems. we're going to invest a lot, but even with that, having the ab ability to enlist other third parties outside of the company to be able to help us out by giving them an incentive to point out when ta see issues is going to help us improve the security of the platform over all. which is why we did this. >> next up, senator booker. >> hello. as you know, match up of my life has been focused on low income communities, poor communities, working class communities and trying to make sure they have a fair shake. this country had a bad -- and americans of color from the red lining, fsa practices in the

mortgage business. i've seen technology as a promise to demock ratize our nation. expand access and opportunities. but unfortunately, we've also seen how platforms, technology platforms like facebook can be used to double down on discrimination and give people more sophisticated tools. in 2016, using a user's race to market categories to potentially against users in the areas of housing, employment and credit. echoing a dark history in this country. facebook committeded to f eed t it. but unfortunately, a year later, they found the system facebook

filt was still allowing housing ads without applying to go forward these new restrictions to put on. facebook then opted a system that's similar to cambridge analytica, that they could self-certify they were not engaging in these practices and complying with federal law to overcome and come play with facebook's policy. unfortunately, in a recent lawsuit, as of february 2018, allegations that that ads were still being created on facebook. still disproportionately impacting communities of color. given the fact you allowed cambridge to self-stert certify is self-certification the best and strongest way to safeguard against the misuse of your platform and protect the data of

users? not let it be manipulate d in such a discriminatory fashion? >> senator, this is a very important question. and in general, we're going to move towards more ai tools to help flag content. in the near term, we have a lot of content on the platform and we, it's hard to review every single thing up front. we do a quick screen. but i agree with you. that i think in this specific case, i'm not happy with where we are and i think it makes sense to really focus on making sure that these areas get more reviews sooner. >> i know you understand there is a growing distrust. i know a lot of civil right's organizations have met with you about facebook's sense of urgency to address these issues. there's a distrust that stems from the fact and i know i've had conversations with leaders

about the lack of diversity min the tech sector, people policing for this data, these problems. are they going to be a part of a more diverse group that's looking at this? you're looking to hire as you said, 5,000 new positions for among other thing, reviewing content. we know in your industry, the inclusi inclusivity, it's a real serious b problems that lacks diversity in a very dramatic fashion. it's not just true with facebook. it's true with the tech area as well. it's important for me to communicate that larger sense of urgency. and what a lot of civil rights organizations are concerned with and we should be working towards more collaborative approach. i'm wondering if you would be openeded to opening your platform to really audit a lot of these companies dealing in areas of credit and housing to

really audit what is happening an better have more transparency. >> i think that's a good idea and i think we should follow up u on the details of that. >> i also want to say that there was an investigation, something is very disturbing to me is the fact that there have been law enforcement organizations have used facebook's platform to surveil african-american organizations like black lives matter. i know you've expressed support for the group u aand the killin was broadcast live on facebook. but there are a lot of communities of color worried that data could be used to surveil groups like black lives matter, like folks who are trying to organize against substantive issues of discrimination in this country. is this something you're committed to addressing and ensure thag the freedoms that

civil rights activists and others are not targeted or their work not being understood mimin trying to undermine the activities those groups are doing. >> yes, i think that's very important. we're committed to that. and in general, unless law enforcement has a very clear b reason to get access to information, we're going to push back on that. zpl for the record, my time has expired, but there's a lawsuit against facebook about discrimination. you move for it to be b dismissed because no harm was shown. could you please submit to the record, you believe that people of color were not recruited for various economic opportunitying or being harmed. can you please clarify why you move to dismiss that lawsuit for the record? >> senator is up next. >> go to you.

>> all right, mr. chairman. thank you. appreciate the time and thank you for being here ooich. i'm over here and thank you for taking time. i know it's been a long day. i think you're at the final stretch here. but i'm glad that you are here. yesterday, facebook sent out a notification to 87 million users that information was given to cambridge analytica without their consent. my daughter was one of the 87 million. and six of my staff, all from nevada, received this notification. can you tell me how many were among the 87 million that received >> i do not have this broken down by state right now. i can have my team follow up with you to get you the information. >> okay, i figured that would be the answer. after getting through this

hearing, people in nevada no longer want to have a facebook account; if that is the case, if a facebook user deletes their account, do you delete their data? >> yes. >> my kids have been on facebook and instagram for years, how long do you keep a user's data? how long do you keep a user's data once they have left? >> if they choose to delete their account, how long do you keep their data? >> i do not know the answer to that. we try to delete it as quickly as is reasonable. we have complex systems. it takes they want to work through on that. we try to move as quickly as possible, i can have my team follow up to get you the data. >> have you ever said that you will not sell and i based on personal information? have you said that you will not sell the data because the usage of it goes too far? >> senator, could you clarify

that? >> have you ever drawn a line on selling data to an advertiser? >> yes, we do not sell it data at all. the way the ad system works, advertisers can come to us and faith i have a message that i am trying to reach a certain type of people. they might be interested in something, they might live in a place. we help them get that message in front of people. this is widely mischaracterized about our system. we do not sell data. this is one of the most important part of how we work. advertisers do not get access to people's individual data. >> have you ever collected the content of the phone calls or messages through any facebook application or service? >> senator, i do not believe we had ever collected the content of phone calls. we have an app called messenger that allows people to message their facebook friends.

on the android operating system, we allow people to use that application as their client for facebook messages and text. we allow people to import their text into that. >> let me ask you about government surveillance. for years facebook said that there should be strict limits on the information the government can access on americans. by the way, i agreed with you that privacy, because privacy is important to people in nevada. facebook users would not trust you if they thought you were giving your private information to the intelligence community, the people thought this. you are using and selling the same data to make money. in this case of cambridge analytic a, you do not even know how it is used after you sell it. can you tell us why this is not hypocritical. >> senator, we do not sell data

to anyone. we do not sell it to advertisers, we do not sell it to developers. we allow people to sign into applications and bring their data. it used to be the data of some of their friends, now it is not. that makes sense. that is basic data portability. you on the data, you should be able to take it from one application to another. >> do you believe you are more responsible with more -- millions of americans personal data than the federal government would be? >> yes. senator, your point about surveillance, i think there is a very important distinction to draw here. when organizations do surveillance, people do not have control over that. on facebook, everything that you share, you have control over it. you can see i do not want this information to be there. you have full access to understand every piece of information that facebook might

know about you. you can't get rid of all of that. i do not know of any surveillance organization in the world that operates that way. this is why that comparison is not apt here. >> do you think you are a victim? >> i do not. >> do you think facebook is a victim? >> i think we had a responsibility to protect everyone in our community from anyone in our ecosystem who is going to potentially harm them. we have not done enough historically. we need to step up and do my. >> do you consider the 87 million users victims? >> yes. they did not want their information to be sold to cambridge analytic a by a developer. that happened. it happened on our watch. even though we did not do it, we have a responsibility to be able to prevent that and be able to take action sooner. we are committing to make sure that we do that going forward. this is why the steps that i announced before our now the two most important things that we are doing. we are looking down the platform to make sure that developers cannot get access. this is largely the case since

2014. going backwards, we need to investigate every single app that might have had at -- access to a large amount of data to make sure that no one else is misusing it. if we find that they are, we are going to get into their system into a full audit and make sure they delete it. we will notify everyone who is affected. >> will senator peters take us into the break? >> thank you mister zuckerberg for being here today. you talked about very humble beginnings in starting facebook in your dorm room. i appreciated that story. facebook has changed a lot over a short period of time. when facebook launched its timeline feature, consumers saw their friends post chronologically. this was the process. facebook has changed to a timeline driven by some very sophisticated algorithms. i think it has left many people

as a result of that asking why am i seeing this feed, why am i seeing this right now? in light of the cambridge analytic issue, facebook users are asking some new questions. can i believe what i am seeing? who has access to this information about me? i think it is safe to say that facebook is losing the trust of a lot of americans. this is as a result of the incident. i think an example of this is something that i have been hearing from people who have been coming up to me and talking about the experience they have had where they are having a conversation with friends, not on the phone, they are just talking. they see as popping up fairly quickly on their facebook. i have heard constituents that facebook is a mining audio from their mobile devices for the

purpose of ad targeting. this speaks to the lack of trust we are seeing. i understand there are technical and logistical issues for that to happen. for the record, i hear it all the time including from my ends, does facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users? >> we do not. senator, let me be clear on this. you are talking about the conspiracy theory get kids passed around that we listen to what is going on on your microphone and use that. we do not do that. we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those. videos also have audio. we do, while you are taking a video, record that and use that to make the service the better by making sure that you have audio. that is pretty clear. i wanted to make sure i was exhausted there. >> i appreciate that. hopefully that will dispel a lot of what i have been

hearing. certainly, today and in era of metadata, we are finding that data drives everything including consumer behavior and consumer information is probably the most valuable information you can get in the data ecosystem. certainly people like the fact that they can have targeted ads that people are going to be interested in as opposed to being bombarded by ads that people do not have interest in. that consumer inch information is important. people are now beginning to wonder is there an expense to that when it comes to exposing them to being manipulated or through deception. you have talked about artificial intelligence. you have brought that up many times during your testimony. you have employed some new algorithms to bring down fake accounts and bring down terrorism, things that you have talked about. artificial intelligence is not without risk. you have to be transparent about how those algorithms are constructed. how do you see artificial intelligence more specifically

dealing with the ecosystem by helping to get consumer insights but keeping consumer privacy say? >> senator i think the core question you are asking about is artificial intelligence transparency. it is important. people are just starting to study it. that is ramping up a lot. this is going to be a very central question for how we think about ai systems. right now a lot of our ai systems make decisions that people do not really understand. i do not think that in 10 or 20 years in the future that we all want to build, we want to end up with systems that people do not understand how they are making decisions. having and doing the research now to make sure that these systems can have those principles as we are developing them, this is extremely important. >> you bring up the suppose.

as you are well aware ai systems in complex environments where you have machine learning, it is difficult to understand exactly how those decisions are arrived at. there is examples of how decisions are made on a discriminatory basis. they can compound if you are not careful about how that occurs. as your company, is your company developing a set of principles that are going to guide that development? can you provide details to us about what those principles are and how they will help deal with those issues? >> i can make sure our team follows up and get to information. we have a whole ai ethics team that is working on developing the technology. it is not just about principles, it is about technological foundations for making sure this goes in the direction that we want.'s neck thank you. >> thank you senator peters, we will recess for five and come back in. we will give mister zuckerberg a quick break here. >> thank you.

[ pause ]

>> we are in the final stretch. >> thank you mister zuckerberg for being here. you have done a good job. i have been here for most of this. i watched 20 minutes on television. i was googling earlier and getting on my facebook application, i found one of your facebook presence, it was the same one on march 30, you posted a picture, further down you listed the facts since the new platform was released in 2007, it was a timeline. start with 2007 then you jump to the cambridge analytica issue. i think that we need to fully examine what cambridge analytica did. the either broke a code of conduct as they break any other

rules or agreements with you all, i hope they suffer the consequences. the timeline needs to be updated. it needs to go back, i have read a series of articles that were published in the mit technology with human 2012. it talks about how 12 the obama campaign was of splitting data on facebook in the 2012 campaign. somebody asked you earlier if it made you mad about what cambridge analytica did and he said yes. i think you should be equally mad when a former campaign direct of the obama campaign probably tweeted, facebook was surprised, we were able to set out the whole social ground. they did not stop us once they realized that is what we were doing. you had some people that you were employing who knew it. that is what this person said on twitter and thank goodness for some of the other history grabber machines. i am sure we can get this in the right context. i think when you do your research, it is important to get a hold of you. i have worked in data analytics

for a good part of my career. for anyone to pretend that cambridge analytica was the first person to exploit data has not worked in the analytic steel. when you do your research on cambridge analytica, i would appreciate it if you would start back from the first man high profile national campaign that exploited facebook data. they published an app that said it would grab information about my friends, their birthdays, locations and the like. if i downloaded that app that was published by the obama campaign, i got 4900 friends on my facebook page, i delete the haters and save room for family members and true friends on my personal page. that means if i click yes on the app, i would have approved the access , birthdate, locations and

likes of 4900 people without their consent. you do the chronology, it would be helpful to take away the partisan rhetoric that is going on like this is a republican and the issue. this is a broad-based issue that needs to be fixed. broad-based actors need to be held accountable. i trust you are going to work on that. the one saying that i would like to say is i want to get to the facts. i am not going to burden you. getting the chronology will be very helpful. i would encourage people to do is go to facebook. i am a proud member of facebook. i just got a post from my sister and i have connected with four or five of my staff. to the privacy mode. if you do not want to share something, do not share it. this is a free service. go on there and say i do not want to allow third-party search engines to get on my page. go on there incidentally my friends can look at it. it is a free application. you need to do more. i think it would be helpful, i did not be disclaimer or the

terms of use because i did not see anywhere that i could get an attorney and negotiate the terms. i went on there and i used the privacy settings so i could be safe with a presence on facebook. the last thing is we talked about proposed legislation. you have ideas. i have one question for you. when you were developing this app, how many people did you have in your regulatory affairs division? [ laughter ] >> exactly. >> if government takes a heavy- handed approach to fix this problem, we know very well that the next thing that you are going to wake up and worry about is how you continue to be relevant. this is probably not going to happen. i think there is probably a place for some regulatory guidance here. there is a huge place for google, snapchat, twitter, all of the other social media platforms to get together and create standards. i also believe that that person

who may have looked in the other way when the whole social graph was extracted for the obama campaign, if they are still working for you, they probably should not. at least there should be a business code of conduct that says that you do not play favorites. you are trying to create a fair place for people to share ideas. thank you for being here. >> thank you senator. the next senator will speak. >> thank you. i am here for the last four hours that you have been testifying. i am concerned about how much facebook values trust and transparency. if we agree that a critical component of the relationship of trust and transparency is that we speak truth and we get to the truth. during the course of this hearing, these last four hours, you have been asked several critical questions. you do not have answers. those questions have included whether facebook can track user's browsing activity even after the user has logged off. whether facebook can track your

activity across devices even when you are not logged into facebook. who is facebook's biggest competition? whether facebook may start 96 categories of users information. whether you knew whether the terms of service and whether you knew if that a company could transfer data. another case, specifically as it relates to cambridge analytica , facebook and i'm going to assume you personally as a ceo became aware of december 2015 that doctor cogan and cambridge analytica misappropriated data from 87 million users. that is 27 months ago. you became aware 27 months ago. a decision was made not to notify the users. my question is: did anyone at

facebook had a conversation at the time that you became aware of this breach? did they had a conversation where in the decision was made not to contact the users? >> senator, i do not know if there were any conversations that facebook overall had. i was in a lot of them. >> on that subject. >> yes. i am not sure what other people discussed. at the time in 2015 we heard the report that this developer had sold data to cambridge analytica. that is in violation of our times. >> were you part of a discussion that was -- resulted in a decision not to inform your users. >> i do not remember a conversation like that. >> are you aware of

anyone in the leadership at facebook who was in a conversation where a decision was made not to inform your users? or do you believe no such conversation ever took place? >> i am not sure whether there was a conversation about that but i can tell you the thought process of the time. in 2015 when we heard about this, we banned the developer and we demanded that they delete all of the data and stop using it. we did the same with cambridge analytica. >> i and talking about notification of the users. this relates to the issue of transparency. it relates to the issue of trust, informing the user about what you know in terms of how their personal information has been diffused. i am also concerned that when you personally became aware of this, did you, the senior leadership do an inquiry to find out who at facebook have this information and that they not have a discussion about whether or not the users should

be informed back in december 2015? >> in retrospect, we viewed it as a mistake that we did not inform people. we did that based on false information, we thought the case was closed and the data was deleted. >> there was a decision made not to inform the users, is that correct? >> yes. in retrospect, that was a mistake. knowing what the men now, we should have handled things different me. much i appreciate that. when was the decision made not to inform the users? >> i do not. >> last november the senate intelligence committee held a hearing on social media influence. i was a part of that. i submitted 50 written questions to facebook and other companies. the responses that we received were evasive and somewhat

nonresponsive. i am going to ask the question again here. how much revenue did facebook earn from the user engagement that resulted from foreign propaganda? >> senator what we do know is the internet research agency, the russian firm ran about $100,000 worth of ads. i cannot say that we have identified all of the foreign actors who are involved. i cannot say that it is all of the money but it is what we have identified. >> my time is up, i will submit more questions for the record. >> thank you so much we had another senator now to give questions. >> mister zuckerberg, i come in peace. [ laughter ] i do not want to have to regulate facebook. i will. a lot of that depends on you.

i am a little disappointed in this hearing today. i just don't feel like we are connecting. let me try to lay it out for you for my point of you. i think you are a really smart guy. i think you have built an extraordinary american company. you have done a lot of good. some of the things that you have been able to do our magical. are promised digital utopia we have discovered has minefields. there is some impurities in the facebook punch bowl. i have got to tell you that they have got to be fixed. i think you can fix them. here is what is going to happen. there is going to be a lot of bills introduced to regulate

facebook. it is up to you whether they pass or not. you can go back home, spend $10 million on lobbyist. or, you can go back home and help us solve this problem. there are two one is a privacy problem, the other is a propaganda problem. let's start with the privacy problem. we will start with the user group. here is what everybody has been trying to tell you today. i say this gently. your user agreement sucks. [ laughter ] you can spot me 75 iq points, if i can figure it out, you can figure it out, the purpose of the user agreement is to cover facebook's rear end. it is not to inform your users about their rights. you know that and i know that.

i am going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it. tell you your $1200 an hour lawyers, no disrespect, they are good. tell them you want it written in english and not in swahili. the average american needs to be able to understand. that would be a start. are you willing, as a facebook user, are you willing to give me more control over my data? >> senator, as someone who uses facebook i believe you should have complete control over your data. >> are you willing to go back and work on getting me a greater right to erase my data? >> you can already delete any of the data that is there or delete all of your data. >> are you going to expand that? >> i think we already do what you are referring to. we are always working on trying to make these controls easier. >> are you willing to expand my right to know who you are sharing my data with? enoch senator, we already give

you a list of applications that you are using and you signed into those yourself and provided affirmative consent. we do not share data& >> on the user agreement, are you willing to expand my right to prohibit you from sharing my data? >> senator, again, i believe that you already have that control. i think people have that full control in the system already today. if we are not communicating this clearly, that is a big thing we need to work on. the principles that you are articulating are the ones that we believe in and try to codify in the product that window. >> are you willing to give me the right to take my data on facebook and move it to another social media platform? >> you can already do that. we have a download your information tool. you can get a file of all the

content there and do whatever you want with it. >> then you are willing to give me the right to say i am going to go on your platform and you are going to be able to tell a lot about me but i do not want you sharing with anybody. >> yes senator. you already have that ability today. people can sign on and choose to not share things and just follow some friends or some pages and read content if that is what they want to do. >> i want to be sure that i understand, i am about out of time. it goes fast. let me ask you one final question in my 12 second. can somebody call you up and they i want to see john kennedy's file. >> absolutely not. >> could you, not would you do it, could you do it? >> in theory. >> do you have the right to put

my data, the name of my data and share it with somebody? >> i do not believe we have the right to do that. >> do you have the ability? >> the data is in the system& >> do you have the ability? >> technically somebody could do it but it would be a massive rate. we would not do that. >> thank you mister chairman. >> thank you mister kennedy. senator baldwin is up next. >> thank you mister chairman. thank you for being here and in during a long day. i want to start with what i hope can be a quick round of questions just so i make sure that i understand your previous testimony. specifically with regard to the process by which cambridge analytica was able to purchase facebook user's data, it was an app developer, he collected data via a personality quiz.

is that correct? >> yes. >> he is able to gain access of not only the people who took the quiz but their network. is that correct? >> senator, yes. the terms of the platform allowed for people to share their information and some basic information about their friends as well. we have changed that as of 2014, that is not possible. >> in total about 87 million facebook users. you earlier testified about the two types of ways you gain data. one is what is voluntarily fared shared by facebook members and users. the other is in order to improve your advertising experience, whatever that means, the data that facebook collects in order to customize or focus on that; was alexander

cogan able to get both of those sets of data or just what was voluntarily entered by the user? >> that is a good question. it was just a subset of what was entered by the person. >> it was a subset of the 95 categories of data that you keep. >> yes. when you sign into an app, the app developer has to hear the types of data. this includes public information, your name and profile, the pages you follow, other interest on your profile, that kind of contents. you agree to dispose that upfront. >> in an answer to a couple of other questions, specifically senator fisher, you talked about facebook's doing this data. you talked about the data being in the system. i wonder if outside of the way

in which alexander cogan was able to access this data whether you, could facebook be vulnerable to a data breach or hack why or why not? >> there are many types of security threats that a company like ours faces. this includes people trying to break into our security system. >> okay. if you believe that you have been hack, do you believe you and i have the duty to inform those who were impacted? >> yes. >> okay. do you know whether alexander cogan sold any of the data he collected with anyone other than cambridge analytica? >> yes we do. he sold it to a couple of other firms. >> can you identify them? >> yes, there is one called you

know. there may have been a couple of others as well. >> can you furnish that for me? thank you. i appreciate that. how much do you know or have you tried to find out how cambridge analytica used the data out while they had it before you believed they deleted it. >> since we just heard that they did not delete it one month ago, we have kicked off an internal investigation to see if they use the data in any of their advertisements. the investigation is still underway. we can come back to you with the results of that. >> i want to switch to my home state of wisconsin. according to press reports, wisconsin was a major target of a russian but add in the 2016 election. these ads touched on a number of very polarizing issues and they were designed to interfere with our election. we have learned that russian

actors using another platform, twitter, similarly targeted wisconsin with divisive content aimed at selling division and dissent including in the wake of a please involved shooting in milwaukee, sherman park neighborhood in august 2016. i find some encouragement in the steps you have outlined today to provide greater transparency regarding political ads. i want to get further information on how you can be confident that you have excluded entities based outside of the united states. >> i will follow up on that. >> on that topic, if you require disclosure of a political ad sponsor, what transparency will you be able to provide with regard to

people who are the subject of that ad, seeing its content? >> senator, you will be able to get to any page and see all of the ads that the page has bought. if someone is running a political campaign for example and they are targeting one district with one at and another district with another, historically, it has been hard to track that. now it will be very easy. you will be able to look at all of the ads that they rand and look at what they are saying two different people. in some cases you can see how much they are spending on the ads. you can see all of the relevant information. this is an area where more transparency will really help discourse over all and reach out for an interference in election. >> senator johnson.'s neck thank you for testifying here today. do you have any idea how many

of your users actually read the terms of service, the privacy policy, the statement of rights and responsibility, how many read it? >> i do not know. >> would you imagine it is a small percentage? >> who read the whole thing? i would imagine that probably most people do not read the whole thing. everyone has the opportunity and consents to it. >> it is true of every application, you want to get to and you have to agree to it and people just press agree, the vast majority, correct? >> it is hard for me to make a full assessment. >> common sense will tell you that would probably be the case. with all of this publicity, have you documented any type of backlash from facebook users. has there been a dramatic fall off in the number of people who utilize facebook because of consent? >> there has not. >> have you been witness to any? >> senator, there was a movement where some people were encouraging their friends to delete their account.

i think got shared. >> facebook users do not seem to be overly concerned about all of these revelations although congress is. >> senator, i think people are concerned about it. i think these are important issues that people want us to address. i think people have told us that clearly. >> it things like facebook users still want to use the platform because they like to share photos and share activity and family members, that overrides their concerns about privacy. you talked about the user owns the data. there have been many proposals that allows the user to monetize it themselves. the coo mentioned possibly if you cannot utilize that data to sell advertising, perhaps we would charge people to go into facebook. have you thought about that model where the user data is actually monetized by the

actual user? >> senator i am not sure exactly how it would work to be monetized by the person directly. in general we believe that the ads model is the right one for us because it aligns with our social mitchell of trying to connect everyone and bring the world closer together. >> you are aware people making that type of proposal, correct? >> yes. many people suggest that we should offer a version where people cannot have as if they pay a monthly subscription. we consider ideas like that. they are reasonable ideas. over all i think that the experience is going to be the best one. in general people like not having to pay for a service, a lot of people cannot afford to pay for a service around the world.'s this aligns with our situation the best.

>> you are obviously a big player in this space. that might be an area for competition if somebody else wants to create a social platform that allows a user to monetize their own data. >> yes. there are lots of new social apps all the time. the average american uses a different communication and social apps. there is a lot of different choices and a lot of innovation and activity going on in this space. >> you talk about the difference between advertisers and application developers, you said in an earlier testimony that advertisers have no access to data whatsoever. but application developers do? is that only for their own service agreement with their customers or do they actually access as a developing application? >> this is an important distinction. thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify this. we give people the ability to take their data to another app if they want. this is a question that senator kennedy asked me a few minutes

ago. the reason why we designed the platform that way is because we thought it would be very useful to make it so people can easily bring their data to other services. some people inside the company argued against that because they were worried because they said we should only be the only ones who develop this. we thought that was a useful thing. >> that is the user agreeing to allow you to share. that the developer have access prior to users using it? you used the term scraped data. what does that mean? who scraped the data? >> yes, this is a good question. there is the developer platform which is a way that an app developer can ask a person to access information. we also have certain features and certain things that are public. a lot of the information that people put on facebook they are sharing with everyone in the world. you put your name, you put your picture, that is public

information. this is what people put out there. sometimes people who are not registered developers of facebook try to load a lot of pages in order to get access to a bunch of people's public information and aggregated. we fight back against -- against that. we do not want aggregated information. >> thank you senator johnson. >> thank you mister chair, thank you mister zuckerberg for being here today. i want to talk to a couple of broader issues. i am concerned that facebook's profitability rests on two problematic foundations. we have heard other senators talk about this a little today. the foundations are maximizing the amount of time people spend on your product and collecting people's data. i have looked at facebook 2017 corporate financial statement where you lay out the major risks to your business.

one risk is a decrease in and i quote user engagement including time spent on the product. that concerns me because of the research we have seen suggesting that too much time spent on social media can hurt people's mental health especially young people. another major risk to your business is the effectiveness of our ad targeting or the degree to which users opt out of certain types of ad targeting including as a result of changes that enhance the user's privacy. there is clearly attention as other senators have pointed out between your bottom line and what is best for your users. you said in your testimony that facebook's mission is to bring the world closer together and you said that you will never prioritize advertisers over that mission. i believe that you believe that. at the end of the day, your business model does prioritize advertisers over the mission.

facebook is eight for-profit company. as the ceo you have a legal duty to do what is best for your shareholders. and all of that, why should we think that facebook on its own will ever truly be able to make the changes that we need it to make to protect americans well- being and privacy? >> you raise a number of important points in their. let me respond. the first is it is very important to think about what we are doing as holding a community over the long term. any business has the opportunity to do things that might increase revenue in the short term but at the expense of trust or building engagement overtime. we find that increasing time spent especially not just in the short time is going to the best for our business. it aligns very closely with the well-being research we have done. when people are interacting with other people and posting and asic rebuilding relationships, that is correlated with higher measures of well-being, health, happiness, not feeling lonely.

and that ends up being better for the business than when they are doing lower value things like just passively consuming content. that is an important point. >> i understand the point that you make here. here is what i am concerned about: we have heard this point from you over the last decade plus. since you found facebook and i understand that you found it pretty much as a solo entrepreneur with your roommate. you are sitting here at the head of a billion-dollar company. we have heard you apologize numerous times and promised to change. here we are again. i very firmly believe in free enterprise but when private companies are unwilling or unable to do what is necessary, public officials have historically in every in this stepped up to protect our kids issuance and consumers. you have supported targeted

regularization such as the honest ads act. that is an important step for election integrity. we need to address other broader issues as well. today you have said you would be open to some regulations and this has been a general conversation. will you commit to working with congress to develop ways of protecting constituent privacy and well-being even if it means that it results in some large that will require you to adjust your business model? be mac yes. we will commit to that. it is an important conversation to have. our position is not that regulation is bad. the internet is so important people's live. it is getting more important. the expectations on companies are growing. i think the real question is what is the correct framework for this, not should there be one. >> the other question and it

does not just apply to facebook, should the framework include financial penalties when large providers like facebook are breached and privacy is compromised as a result? there is very little incentive for whether it is facebook or aqua facts to actually be abreast of protecting customer privacy and working for potential breaches or vulnerabilities in the system. after people's privacy has been breached, after they had taken the harm that comes with that, and considerable inconvenience to the harm, we have heard apologies but there is no financial incentive right now it seems to me for these companies to aggressively stand in their consumer's instead and protect their privacy. i will look forward to working with you on that. >> senator we look forward to discussing that with you. i would disagree that we have

no financial or& overall to do this. this at this has clearly hurt us. it has clearly make it harder for us to achieve the social mission that we care about. we have to do a lot of work around the living trust back. this is just a really important part of this. >> thank you, my time is up. i will follow up with you. thank you for being here today. i want to ask a process question. you said more than a few times that facebook users can delete from their own account at any time. we know and i have got grandchildren with children, you tell your children once you make that mark in in the internet system, it never really goes away. my question to you is: once an

individual deletes the information from their page, it is gone forever from facebook archives? is that correct? >> yes. i think you raise a good point. we will delete it from our systems. but if you have shared something with someone else, we cannot guarantee that they do not have it somewhere else. >> if somebody leads facebook and then rejoins and asks facebook can you re-create my past, your answer would be& >> if they delete their accounts the answer is we cannot. we offer of time, we hear students with exams want to not be on facebook because they want to make sure they can focus so they deactivate temporarily and want ability to turn it back on. you can delete which is wiping everything. you can't get it back you can't get it back. it's gone from archives? >> yes.

>> is it ever really gone? >> from our systems it is. >> from the cloud or wherever it is? it seems to be able to reappear in investigations and other things of that nature. what about information going from the past? information that is already been in the cambridge analytica case. i'm going to assume what we've been talking about and improvements now at facebook are from this point forward is that a correct assumption? >> i think we can to back in cases and a announced we're going to be investigating every app that had access to the information before we locked down the platform in 2014. if we find a pattern of suspicious activity we're going to do an audit of their systems and if we find anyone is improperly using data we'll take

action to make sure they delete the data. >> other suggestion is you've heard more than a few complaints of the lapse in the time of when you discovered and when you became transparent and you're saying you sent out two messages to users so you say you regret that decision? you wish you'd been more transparent. i imagine if you find more breeches you'll be reinforming your facebook customers? >> yes. that is correct. we've committed that if we find improper use, we'll inform everyone affected. >> thank you. >> you said that you want to have an active view on controlling your ecosystem. the fda commissioner addressed a drug summit in atlanta and spoke on the national opoid epidemic.

my state, west virginia, thank you for visiting and next time you visit please bring fiber we don't have connectivity in rural areas and facebook could help us with that. so commissioner gotly called upon social media and mentioned facebook when he talked about it to try to disrupt the sale of powerful opoid fentynol and i want to know can i get a commitment that facebook will commit to having a representative to finalize with this meet something. >> senator, that sounds like an important initiative and we'll send someone. >> let me say on the point about connectivity we do have a group working on trying to spread internet connectivity in rural areas that, is something i'm

very passionate about. >> that is good news. last question just on advertising if someone advertises on facebook and someone purchases something does facebook get a percentage or fee associated with the successful purchase from an advertiser. >> senator, no. the way the system works is people, advertisers bid how much it's worth it to them to show an ad. or when an action happens so it's not we'd get a percent of the sale. let's say you're an app developer and the goal is that you want to get more people to install your app you can bid in the ad system saying i will pay $3 any time someone installs this app. and we calculate which ads are going to be revellent.

and that is how the system works. >> it could be, you could be paid for the sale? >> we get paid when the action of the advertiser wants to happen, happens. >> thank you. mr. zuckerberg, thank you. been a long afternoon and i appreciate you being here and taking time wither one of us, i'm going to echo what i have heard my colleagues say today, appreciate you being here. appreciate at the apology but i think it's time to change the conduct. i appreciate the fact you talked about the principles for facebook. notice to user on the use of the data and that users have complete control of their data. but the skepticism i have, and i'm hoping you can help me with this is over the last what? seven years? 7, 14 years haven't seen much change in ensuring the privacy

is there and that individual users have control of the data. so in 2009, you made two changes to your privacy policy. prior to that, most users could either identify only friends or friends of friends as part of their privacy, correct? if they wanted to protect data? they can identify only friends or friends of friends who can see their data isn't that correct? >> senator, i we've had the option to share with friends, friends of friends custom audience or publicly for a long time. i don't remember when we put that into place but i believe before 2009. >> you can choose only friends or friends of friends to decide how you're going to share that, protect that data, correct? >> those 2004 options, yes. >> in 2011 had ftc started to take a look at this they were concerned if someone chose only

friends that the individual user was under the impression they can continue to restrict to limited audience but that wasn't the case and in fact did not prevent the applications from sharing information the app used and there was concern that if you had friends on your page, a third party could access that information? isn't that correct? >> senator, i don't remember the exact context. >> let me help you hear, david laddik, he worked at the bureau of consumer protection including on the ftc enforcement case against facebook identifies in this article that that was the case. not only did facebook misrepresent and there are eight counts of deceptive acts and

practices the ftc in november's 2011 decree basically stated, required facebook to give clear notice and obtain affirmative, jump back here, to dozo three things. decree barred facebook from making deceptive privacy claims and third thing, required facebook to give users clear notice and to obtain affirmative expressed consent before sharing their data with third parties, correct? >> senator that sounds right to me. >> at that time, you're on notice there are concerns about the sharing of data and information user stats including friends with third parties, correct? >> senator, my understanding -- >> let me do it this way. in response to ftc consent to

make those changes, did you make those changes and what did you do to ensure individual user data was protected and they had notice that have information and potentially third parties would be accessing that? what did you do in response to that? >> a number of things one of the most-important parts of the consent decree we signed was establishing a robust privacy program at the program headed by our chief privacy officer. >> can you give me specifics? i heard this over and over again, i'm running out of time. here is the concern that i have. it can't be a privacy policy because that is what the consent said it couldn't be. it had to be something specific and something simple that did not occur. had that occurred, we won't be here today talking about cambridge analytica. had you addressed those issues then, had you done an audit, had you looked at the third party

applications and their associated dalta storage would you have known that this type of data information was being shared. and that is our concern. and that is what i'm saying now, time just to make the change. it's time to really address the privacy issue. it's time to come and lead the countryh5 on this issue and howe can protect individual users data and information. i know my time is rung out. i appreciate you being here and just hoping you're committed to working with news the future and addressing these concerns. >> thank you, senator. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg for your patience. the end is near, 1, 2, 3, or 4 people, it's good news. to get out of the hearing. a couple questions for you. to clarify one of the comments made about deleting accounts from facebook n user agreement it says when you delete ip content if deleted in a manner similar to emptying recycle bin on a computer, you understand it may persist in back up copies

for a reasonable period of time. how long is that? >> senator, i don't know sitting here what our current systems are on that. the intent is to get all of the content out of the system as quickly as possible. >> does that mean your user data as well? your ip content can sit in back up copies? >> senator that is probably right. i don't, i'm not sitting hear ted having full knowledge of our current state of the systems around wiping all of the data out of back ups. i can follow up with you on that afterwards. what i can tell is that -- >> back up --)g5.gó >> that is the way it's supposed to work. >> has there been a failure of that? >> senator, i don't know. this is, if we tell people we're going to delete their data we need to do that. and you do do that. >> thank you mr. zuckerberg. i think that gets to the heart of this expectation gap as i

call it with users. facebook, as i understand it, if you're logged in with a separate tn article, open a new tab this n.the browser that new tab has a facebook button on it, you track articles that you're reading is that correct? >> i think there is functionality like that, yes. >> do you think users understand that? >> senator, i think there is a reasonable, i think the answer is probably yes for the following reason. we show i like button and show social context there. so it says here are your friends that like that. >> if you have your browser open

and do you think they know that fatesbook know what's article you're reading in the denver post? >> well, we'd need to have that in order to serve up that button and show who friends were who would also like that. >> so i think that goes to the heart of the expectation gap. i don't think consumers, users understand that. i mean going to this use dpreement you do need a lawyer to understand it. i hope you can close that expectation gap by simplifying!d agreement, making sure people understand privacy. has there been a talk outside of cambridge analytica? has the privaty setting been violated outside cambridge analystica? >> i am not aware, users have been respected. there is never an instance where

privacy settings have been violated. >> that is my understanding this, is the core thing our company does is come to facebook, say i want to share this photo. or send a message to these people. >> i understand. >> has there ever been a breech of facebook data? a hack? >> um, there have been, i don't believe there has been a breech of data we've been aware. >> has there been a hack? >> yes. >> have those hacks accessed user data? . >> i don't believe so. we had an instance in 2013 where someone was able to install malwear on a few employees' computers and had access to some content on their computers, but i don't believe -- >> user page? never affected the user page? . >> i don't believe so. >> has the government ever asked to have a page removed? >> senator, i believe so. >> okay.

and as the government ever -- can you get a warrant to join a page to get the, on a page? pretending you're a separate user to track and warrant for that? can the government just do that? the fbi? anybody? >> i am not sure i understand that. >> we can follow up on. that a couple days ago facebook talked about it would label traditional advocacy as political ads and if the sierra club was to run a climate change ad that would be labelled political. political ad. if chamber of commerce wanted to place an ad as this would be a impact on the regulations would have an impact to talk about that through an ad that would be labelled as political which is different than current standards of what is political and issue advocacy. is it your intent to label things political? that would be in contradiction

to federal law? >> senator, the intent of what we're trying to get at is the foreign election interference we've seen has taken more of the form of issue ads than direct political electioneering advertising so because of that we think it's important to extend the verification and transparency to issue ads in order to block the kind of interference that the russians attempted to do and i think will likely continue to attempt to do. that is why i think those measures are important to do. >> thank you. >> thank you senator. senator tester. >> thank you mr. chairman. thank you for being here today, mark, i appreciate you coming in and i hope this isn't the last time we see you in front of committee. i know this is approaching five hours so it's been a little tenuous and mental gymnastics for all of us. and i want to thank you for being here.

facebook is an american company. and with that, i believe you've got a responsibility to protect american liberties central to our privacy. facebook aloud a foreign company to steal private information. they allowed a foreign company to steal private information from tens of millions of americans, largely without any dodge of their own whochlt and how we choose to share opinions is question of personal freedom. who we share our likes and dislikes with is a question of personal freedom. this is a troubling episode that completely shatter that's liberty so that you understand the magnitude of this. montanans are deeply concerned with this breach of privacy and tuft. we've been at this nearly five hours today, besides taking reactive steps and i want you to be as concise as you possibly

can, what are you doing to make sure what cambridge analytica did never happens again. >> thank you senator. first we need to finish resolving this by doing a full audit to make sure they delete all of the data they have so we can fully understand what happened. there are two sets of steps taken to make sure that this doesn't happen again. most important is restricting the amount of access to information that developers will have going forward. the good news here is that back in 2014, we actually had made a large change to restrict access on the platform that would have prevented this issue from happening again today. clearly we did not do that soon enough f we'd done it a couple years earlier we won't be sitting here today this, isn't a change we had to take now. it's a change we had back in 2014. >> okay. >> there are other parts of the platt form we similarly can lock

down now to make sure other issue that's might have been exploited in the future won't be able to. and we've taken a number of steps and have outlined those in the written statement as well. >> i appreciate that. you feel confident the steps taken about locking down the other parts will protect the folks who use facebook? >> senator, i believe so. security is never a solved problem. >> that is all i need. >> you talked about a full audit of cambridge systems, can you do a full audit of that information stored some other country? >> senator, we're waiting because uk government is doing a government investigation of them. and i do believe the government will have the ability to get into the system if we can't. >> if stored in the uk. what if it's stored in another country?

what if the information is stored in another country? is an audit possible? >> well, senator, we believe a bunch of information we will be able to audit. i think you raise an important question and if we have issues then we, if we're not able tho do an audit to our satisfaction, we're going to take legal action to enable to us do that. and if, i know that the uk and u.s. governments are involved and workingthon as well. >> i don't really, i'm telling you i have faith in the u.s. government. i actually have faith in the uk, too. i -- there have been claims this information is being stored in russia. i don't care, it could be stored anywhere in the world. i don't know how you get access to that information. i'm not as smart as you are about tech information. so the question really becomes and i got to move on but the question is, i don't see how you can perform a full audit if they've got stuff stored somewhere else we can't get access to, that is all. maybe you have ideas on how to

do that. >> well, i think we'll know once we get in there once we feel like we can investigate everything. >> senator asked a question about data and when owns data. i want to dig into it a little bit more. you said, and i think multiple times during this hearing i own data on facebook if it's my data. >> yes. >> and i'm going to tell you that sounds really good to me but in practice, let's think about this for a second. you're making about $40 billion a year on the data. i'm not making any money on it. it feels like you own the data. and in fact, i would say that the data that was preached through cambridge analystica, 80 million americans my guess is that few, if any knew that that information was being breached. if i own that data, i know it's being breached.

so could you give me some sort of idea on how you can honestly say it's my data? when frankly, they may have goods on me i don't want them to have information on me. >> senator. when i say -- >> i can stop it. if i own it. >> yes. so senator, when i say it's your data, what we mean is that you have control over how it's used on facebook. you clearly need to give facebook a license to use it within our system or else the service doesn't work. >> yeah. i know. and this license has been brought up many times a day. i'm going to be quiet in just one second, mr. chairman. the license is very thick. maybe intentionally so so people get tired of reading it and don't want to, mark i appreciate you being here and looking forward to having you in another hearing. thank you. >> senator young. >> mr. zuckerberg thank you for being here and enduring many questions today. it's important you're here because your social media

platform happens to be the yu social media platt form today and we have to to be on it z so i think it's important that you're here not just for facebook for the country and beyond. the threshold question that continues to emerge here today is what are the reasonable expectations of privacy that users ought to have? and i'll tell you my neighbors are unsatisfied by an answer to that question that involves take a look at the user agreement. and i think there has been a fair amount of discussion here about whether or not people actually read that user agreement. i encourage you to survey that and get all of the information you can with respect to that and make sure that user agreement is easy to understand and stream

lined and so forth. mr. zuckerberg, you drew a distinction i thought was interesting. it caught may tension. between consumer expectation of privacy depending l they're on an isp or pipes of the internet, or on an edge platform like platform. i find this somewhat unsatisfying because most folks who use the internet just think of it as one place if you will. they think of it as the internet as opposed to various places requiring different degrees of privacy. could you speak to this issue? and indicate whether you support a comp hence rif privacy policy applying in the same man why tore all entity as cross the internet ecosystem? >> senator, sure. i think that people's

expectations of how to use these systems are different. some apps are light weight. as are and you can encrypt data going across them in the way the pipes in the isp case and probably shouldn't be able to see any of the content and should have a full expectation no one is going to be looking at that content. >> other examples, kindly. >> sure, when data is going over verizon network it would be good for that to be as encrypted as possible. and sub set verizon won't look at it. that is how what's app works, too. it's a light weight app that doesn't require us to know a lot of information about you. we can offer that with full

encryption and we're not looking, we don't see the content. for a service like facebook or instagram you're sharing photos and then say, people want to access them, people kind of want to store that in a central place. so they can go access it from lots of different devices. in order to do that, we need to have an understanding of what that content is. so i think the expectations of what facebook will have knowledge of verses what isp will have knowledge of are just different. >> i think that needs to be clearly communicated to your users and we'll leave it at that. those different levels of privacy that the user can expect to enjoy when on your platform i'd like to sort of take a different track with you, sir. might we create stronger privacy rights for consumers through creating a stronger general

property right regime online, say a law states that users own their online data or stronger opt in requirements on platforms like yours? if we're to do that, would you need to retool your model? if we're to adopt one of the two approaches? >> senator can you repeat what they are again? >> one create a stronger property right for the individual online through a law states users own their data. other one is a stronger affirmative opt in requirement to be a user on facebook. would you have to change the facebook architecture to accommodate those policies? >> those policies are how we view our service already. so depending on details of what you are, proposal ends up being

just matter a huge amount here, it's not clear but details matter and if this is something you're considering or working on, we'd love to follow up with you on this because it's important to get right. >> i'd love to work with you on that. i'm out of time. >> thank you. >> senator stone has an opposing comment. i have a process statement for everybody to listen to. >> thank you. and thank you to our members for their patience, it's been a long hearing. particularly for you, mr. zuckerberg. thank you for sitting through this, is important and do i have a letter from motion picture of america i want to get into the record without occasion. >> without objection, so ordered. >> and just a quick wrap up question and comment. you have answered several questions about today about efforts to keep bad actors whether a terrorist group to malicious foreign agent off of

your platform and heard concerns about bias at basebook against conservatives. and i just as a final question can you assure us when you are improving tools to stop bad actors that you'll err on the side of protecting speech, especially political speech from different corners? >> senator. yes. that is our approach. if there is a threat of harm we're going to take a conservative position on that and make sure we flag that and understand that more broadly. i want to make sure we provide people with the most voice possible. i want the widest possible expression and i don't want anyone at our company to make decisions based on the political ideology of the content. >> yes. >> just one final observation, mr. zuckerberg answered a lot of questions today but there are a

lot of promises to follow up with some members and sometimes, questions about facebook practices seem straight forward but i don't think we have, i think it's going to be hard to fashion this stuff until we have answers and you'd indicated you're trying to find out who, among these companies may have had access to user data that they're able to use and hopefully you'll be able to forward those to us. and it will help shape our thinking in terms of where we go from here. and i think this is very informative hearing and i'm ready to wrap it up yes. i probably won't make the comments but your response to him in regard to political speech. i won't identify the ceo i had a conversation with yesterday. but one of our platforms and he

admitted to being more or left than right, or being left is what he admitted and i don't want to, i'm not asking you what you are. but just so you understand as liberals have a lot of concerns about you know the leaning of fox news or conservatives have questions about the leaning of msnbc, let's say, it seems to me that when you, when we get l it's from right or left, so i'm speaking to you from your platform there is a great deal of cynacism about government. it seems to me everything do you

to lean over backwards to make sure that you are fair in protecting political speech right or left you ought to do it and i am in the telling you how to do it. and i'm in the saying you don't do it. but we've got to do something and reduce the cynicism. at my town meetings in iowa i get a question how come you guys in washington, d.c. can't get along? republicans and democrats? i try to explain to them that the kind of get an obtuse what will you say, reviewing what goes on here, controversy makes news so if people are get ak long you never hear about that. so they get a distorted view of it. and really we, congressmen get along more than the public thinks but these attitudes of

the public we've got to change and people of your position and your influence you can do a lot of change there. whether i know you have plenty of time to run your corporation or privately and anything you can do to reduce this cynicism. because we have a perfect constitution, maybe it's not perfect but a good constitution along with a writtin constitution in the history of man kind. and but if people don't have faith in the institutions of government, and then, it's our responsibility to enhance that faith, so they have less cynicism on us, you know don't have a strong democracy because we've got a if constitution. i hope that everybody will do whatever they can to help enhance, respect, our government including speaking to myself, i got a bend over backwards to do what i can so they don't, so i don't add to that cynicism.

sorry you had to listen to me. and this concludes today's hearing. thank you witnesses for attending. the record will be open 14 days for the members to submit additional written questions and for the witness, mr. zuckerberg to make corrections to his testimony. the hearing is adjourned. >> after the hearings of the

reporters spoke to senators about mark zuckerberg's attorney.